"Anomalisa" tells a small story – just a lonely man meeting a woman at a hotel – in even smaller fashion – with dolls and stop-motion animation – with an even smaller budget. Yet for such a seemingly tiny project, Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s film leaves a big impact, telling a complex and funny of loneliness and connection with a human heart that beats louder than most movies with actual humans in them. It’s left a big mark on critics in 2015 too, scoring high on several best of lists – and not to mention nabbing a Best Animated Film nomination.

While "Anomalisa" takes place in Cincinnati (with its famous zoo; it’s zoo-sized!), it turns out that there’s a dash of Milwaukee in the project too thanks to Milwaukee-born animator Owen Klatte. A graduate of Tosa East and UWM, Klatte’s worked on animated films and projects of all varieties, from stop-motion ("The Nighrmare Before Christmas") to computer created ("Dinosaur," the animated sequence in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1") and now back again to stop-motion, using his human hands to bring the puppet people to life in "Anomalisa."

OnMilwaukee recently caught up with Klatte to talk about the making of "Anomalisa," the process behind turning puppets into people, stop-motion sex and the movie’s Oscar odds against "Inside Out."

OnMilwaukee: How did you get involved with "Anomalisa"?

Owen Klatte: We were living in California ‘til the end of 2013. My wife and I are both animators, and we had been working on various things around L.A., but we were starting to plan to move back here. A stop-motion job came up – which we hadn’t done in about a decade or more – so we worked on one, and then a couple of others came along – including "Anomalisa." I just got on that because I met people or reconnected with people in the stop-motion field. So they were in production, and I worked on it for about six months.

OnMilwaukee: Why the kind of hiatus from stop-motion?

Klatte: Because we were working in computer graphics. We moved to California in 1982 and really got going in animation in about ’85. From about ’87 on, we were working in stop-motion – this was in San Francisco – for about ten years, with commercials like the Pillsbury Doughboy and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach."

And then in ’96, we moved down to L.A. to work on "Dinosaur," and that’s where we really learned computer graphics and spent the next 15 years in computer graphics – including a stint in Australia working on Harry Potter. So that’s why we got away from stop-motion for a while.

_{Owen Klatte working on an early animation project.}

OnMilwaukee: What all particular scenes you helped with for "Anomalisa"?

Klatte: One sequence was during the middle of the dream sequence, where he’s all freaked out and grabs Lisa from her room and she’s in her bathrobe and he drags her down the hall and comes into his room. My shots pick up when he first pulls her into the room, and he starts packing a suitcase and running out of the bathroom with all of this stuff, and they have a little exchange. That whole back and forth sequence I did. Then I did some of the stuff on the stage at the end, when he’s giving his talk. Those are the main sequences there; I did a couple of other odds and ends.

OnMilwaukee: What was the process, and how many people were involved behind animating "Anomalisa"?

Klatte: Well, it was an interesting project because, for one thing, it was very low budget. We weren’t getting paid all that well compared to other jobs (laughs) – and it happened to come at an unusual time when there were actually five different stop-motion animation projects going on at the same time in L.A., which was really unusual to have that much of it going on – so people were coming and going a lot. Another project would start up, and people would leave "Anomalisa" to go over there. So they ended up having something like 35 different animators having worked on it, many of them only doing maybe one shot or a couple different bits and pieces. At any given time, there were about a dozen or maybe 15 animators working.

Because it was a pretty extraordinary production – they did these very long takes – we didn’t do as many shots as usual because the shots we did do were much longer than usual, so that’s why any given person might not have done as many.

OnMilwaukee: Was that, the long-take aspect of "Anomalisa," the hardest part, or was it something else that was the most different part of bringing the stop-motion to life?

Klatte: The length of the shots was definitely a hard thing, because it makes everything longer. It takes much longer to set the shots up because there’s just more planning to do – and especially since most shots had a camera move that you had to coordinate with and had to get developed. So it was the length of the shots added a lot of the complexity.

The way they were lighting it made it more difficult, because the lights were kind of down closer to the puppets than usual, so you had to duck under the lights a lot of times to do your animation, which made it harder.

The puppets themselves – because the project was a very low-budget feature – were really well done considering, but their armatures were not as good as you would hope to have on a feature film, so it took some extra work to animate them. And because the puppets were made out of silicone – because they wanted them to look realistic and have that smooth skin texture they have; the normal way puppets like that might be made would be with foam rubber – which gives a very different look which is really good and really worked with the movie, but it’s also harder to animate because it’s stiffer and makes it harder to get the right kinds of bends to make the characters do the things that we want. So there were just a variety of things that made it actually a pretty darn difficult project to work on.

OnMilwaukee: Can you take me through the planning process?

Klatte: There’s storyboards for every shot that work out what’s going to happen in the shot, what the dialogue is and the basic camera angles of what they want the shots to look like. So when the animator gets that, they get what’s called exposure sheets, which is a long sheet of paper or many sheets of paper with the dialogue kind of laid out or broken down so you know frame-by-frame what words are where. You sit down with the director, and you know the character might take 20 seconds to say this line, so you start breaking down, "OK, what’s he doing?" Because the storyboards are just a few still frames, of course, a few drawings and some rough positioning.

So then you have to go through and kind of act it out. You try to get into the character, and if there are multiple characters, you do it with somebody else. And you’re saying, "What would he do here? Is he shifting his weight from his right to his left foot? And what’s his right hand doing? And where’s he looking? And how long does he take if he’s picking something up?" You have to time out every tiny piece of action, and you’re thinking about if he lifts something up, does his whole body weight shift a little bit to a side. So you act that out.

That’s what animators do; they’re constantly thinking of the minutiae. Like any actor would do, it’s working out all the details of how does this character actually act – all the way down to what are his fingers doing while he’s standing there. Does he curl his fingers? Does he scratch himself? Is he drumming his fingers on the edge of a table? You weigh all that out on these sheets of paper, and that becomes your basic plan for a shot.

That was another thing about this movie: We didn’t have enough time, because of the budget again, to do multiple tests. On something like "Nightmare Before Christmas," you’d actually do usually at least two, maybe three, progressively more detailed tests of each shot before you shot the final shot, refining things, working out details and making all these notes on your exposure sheets as you go so that, by the time you’re doing the final shot, you’ve really worked things out, you’ve got it in your mind pretty well and you can go ahead and shoot the final shot. Because that’s the thing with stop-motion: Once you start, it’s a performance. You start at the beginning, and you have to go straight through to the end.

That’s why pre-planning is really important, and with this movie, because we didn’t have as much time as you’d normally want – and even though these shots were much more long and complicated – we’d only get maybe one or two shot tests before the final shot. So there was a lot more pressure to get it right.

OnMilwaukee: How was the planning out of the sex scenes? Because they are – I don’t want to call them graphic, but they are realistic, complete with nudity. What is it like mapping those out?

Klatte: (laughs) I actually wasn’t there when those were shot; I had left by that time. But what I know is that nobody was feeling very comfortable about doing that. In fact, the first person they asked to do it said no, I can’t do it because Michael Stone, the main character, looks too much like my dad. He just couldn’t feel comfortable about doing it.

As I understand it – I’m not absolutely sure about this – but I believe it ended up being the director Duke Johnson animating much, if not all of it, just because nobody else was comfortable with it.

But they had to do the same thing: You get two people, and you act it out, because if you look during the scene, there’s some subtle stuff going on with the bodies and with what’s Lisa’s doing with her hands. All of these little details that bring it to life and make it real had to be thought through in great detail and planned out. There must have been some interesting video sessions. (laughs)

OnMilwaukee: How does it feel to have a movie nominated for an Oscar this year?

Klatte: Of course, it’s great to be involved with any film that gets an Oscar nomination. The only other one I think I’ve been involved with was "Nightmare," which got an effects nomination. But it’s really cool, for sure.

OnMilwaukee: How do you feel about your changes against really the opposite of you guys, a monolith with Pixar and "Inside Out"?

Klatte: I think the odds are that "Inside Out" will get it. I think "Anomalisa" is definitely a dark horse in this race. You never know, but I’m almost certain that "Inside Out" is the presumptive favorite.

I think it actually should win, or have a very strong change, "Anomalisa" should, because it’s very unique. There’s really nothing like it that’s been done before. It’s a very adult sort of animated story, which is something that people in the industry have been looking for for a long time. I mean, there’s adult stuff like "South Park" – raunchy stuff – and other animated films with adult themes, but it’s kind of rare. This has that; it’s not just for kids and families. And the process and making of it – the lighting, the shot lengths and the whole feeling of it – it’s so different than anything I think that’s been done before that I think it definitely should be considered.