Men, women and not-so-mythical beasts have world-spanning adventures in the ingeniously wrought and intermittently enthralling “Missing Link.”
Though it breaks new ground visually, elements of the tale don’t always meld with grace. The film is a rich-looking blend of stop-motion animation, enhanced with computer-generated effects and 3D printing techniques (keep an eye on the characters’ smooth yet expressive faces). Yet these are all at the service of a perhaps over-intellectualized, emotionally wanting plot, humor that doesn’t always land, and a too-frequent and too-dark undercurrent of threatened violence.
In September, audiences saw the more conventionally computer-animated “Smallfoot,” a buddy comedy about a Himalayan yeti and a publicity-hungry TV host. That film was pure fun, turning folklore on its head, with humans as mythical creatures in the yetis’ imaginations. “Missing Link” tells a more complex tale, set in the Victorian era and realized in the more artisanal look of stop-motion. It comes from the storytellers at Laika Entertainment, the Portland studio that made the uniformly excellent “Kubo and the Two Strings,” “The Boxtrolls” and “Coraline.”
Chris Butler wrote and directed “Missing Link” and also designed the characters. His first film as writer/co-director was Laika’s “ParaNorman,” about a boy who felt like an outcast and saw ghosts. Here he creates two more outcasts — an explorer whose views aren’t accepted by the adventurers’ club he longs to join, and a lonely, last-of-his-breed sasquatch who wants to leave the Pacific Northwest and join his cousins in the Himalayas.