How Puppets Have Sex: A Five Step Process

In December of 2012, Thewlis and Leigh recorded all their audio for the film. But instead of the usual solitary voiceover recording used in animated films, the actors laid down the voices in the same room—as if they were doing it again as a play. “It was the most graphic sex scene I’ve done and I was fully clothed,” Leigh says. “I was six feet away from David Thewlis. I felt so exposed. It felt so real and graphic and embarrassing. I don’t know if it has to do with the writing or the voices or us being in this dark room and it being all about sound. And not having any movement or anything to hide behind, or any way to protect yourself. [But] I felt very exposed when we did the love scene.”

The directors then used that recording as a guide for how the scene would physically unfold. They needed to understand the pacing before determining the puppets actual actions. “There’s a lot of empty space to fill,” Johnson explains. “It was like, ‘How does this work? How long does it take to move up onto the bed and pull the covers back? What would you do?’ It was a lot of talking and feeling it out in your own body and putting yourself in the characters’ minds and thinking how they feel awkward. You have to undress and you have to take your clothes off, and at what point do you take your shoes off? At what point do you take your shirt off? Do they help each other undress?”

Anomalisa's sex scene alone was an immense challenge when it came to the puppets and took about three months worth of researching and testing to achieve. The puppet department created and built over twenty versions of Michael in various incarnations. For the sex scene—as well as a shower scene—they also need a naked version, which had to be anatomically correct. The genitalia they made was removable, mostly so that Michael and Lisa would be able to fit together for the actual sex. Kastelic and her team started with sculpted penises as a reference. It was eventually decided to only show the flaccid version in the film, both for creative reasons and for rating board issues, and Johnson selected the final penis from several color variations.

“I remember one day on set—I can’t remember for which scene—where I was called onto set and they said, ‘He doesn’t have a urethra,’” Kastelic recalls. “So we added one. The penis was a separate piece—it wasn’t cast as part of the nude Michael. It was a separate mold. The placement of that was very specific and I had to do an Internet search of ‘old man genitalia.’ I remember that day and being like ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to do this.’”

A lot of work went into ensuring that both naked puppets would be functional as well as aesthetically correct. Kastelic had two painters for the puppets and each one took about a week to patch, seam and paint. The Michael puppet is twelve inches—1/6th scale—because it allowed for the most detail possible without compromising the stop-motion process.

“First thing we addressed is how the puppets need to function,” Kastelic says. “How they need to be able to bend but still look realistic. We can do a lot of cheats when the puppet is fully clothed. So we had to really think about how a full nude puppet could operate without making it look hideous. We actually had to buy specific armatures for that. We designed them here and then had super high-end ball and socket armatures for the scene. You have to bend precisely at the right place. We did a lot of tests to get it right.”

“It’s trying to figure out how to do it so it’s an extension of the rest of the scene and not betray the characters and make it into a puppet sex joke scene,” Kaufman adds. “We needed the puppets that could do that.”

Watching the scene, it’s notable how much the puppets' movements look real. That’s because the directors filmed real people acting out the scene in order to ensure that everything was as precise as possible. “We filmed real people moving,” Johnson says. “The animators need a lot of visual reference to see how things like fabric moves and comforters and how bodies press against each other. We filmed people not acting the emotion of the scene but going through the physical actions of it multiple times, and chopped that up and edited it together with the sound that the actors recorded.”

It was important that the action unfolds seamlessly, as well, because of the scene’s narrative arc. “You see the whole shebang from the beginning flirtation to the nervousness to when the lights go off,” Kaufman says. “It’s one continuous real-time thing. You don’t see that in movies generally.”

“We know how to watch movies because we’ve seen so many movies,” Johnson adds. “And there never is a sex scene where from the moment they start kissing to the moment have orgasms there’s no cutting. [In Anomalisa], they start having sex and the camera just stays on them. It’s almost unrelenting for an audience because you don’t cut away. You’re just watching this whole experience.”

The biggest concern for Kaufman and Johnson was making sure the sex scene wasn’t being played as a sight gag or a joke. It’s a central moment of the film’s story (no spoilers) and it shifts everything in the narrative in an important way. It includes cunnilingus, penetration and moments of fumbling clumsiness. “We were cognizant of the danger,” Kaufman says. “Throughout the entire film we were doing everything possible to keep that at bay. We want these people, these characters, to be puppets but to be felt as humans. It’s not for effect. It’s not a gag. It’s part of the story and it’s always been part of the story.”

For the directors, the sense of sincere intimacy comes from a few places, but one of the primary ones is that the puppets are built as real people with real bodies, as opposed to the taut, chiseled bodies of actors you’re used to seeing get it on.

“I feel like it’s more acceptable to an audience that these puppets have fat on their bodies than if actors had fat on their bodies and they were forced to watch them having sex,” Kaufman says. “It’s somehow gross to people to see normal people having sex in a movie or it’s a joke or something. It’s played for laughs—and it’s played that way a lot when you see it in movies. Somehow you feel the vulnerability of these bodies. It makes me feel affection for them.”

“They’re not made to create some kind of erotic experience or comedic experience,” Johnson adds. “It’s a more naturalistic, average, authentic sexual encounter between these two people. It emphasizes and heightens that experience.”

As a viewer, you’re more fully drawn in because there isn’t a familiar actor miming the sex on-screen. It somehow becomes more real when you aren’t imaging how the celebrities underwent the scene, which is something Kaufman feels is to the film’s benefit, and one of the reasons the stop-motion aesthetic worked so well overall. “People know so much about movies being made that they know there’s a crew around there and it becomes, ‘What’s it like to be pretending do that if there’s a crew around?’” he says. “‘Are they embarrassed? Are they wearing special little genitalia covers?’ None of that enters into it in Anomalisa so that does help.”

All that research, all that experimentation and observation, all that "old man genitalia" Googling—it all came together so well that it had a strong impact on Leigh when she finally saw the finished product, even though she was part of the creation of the scene. “I kept getting drawn in and forgetting they were puppets and then remembering and then getting drawn in,” the actress says. “ There’s something about the puppets that allows everyone to project themselves on to them in a certain way. It becomes more intimate and you become more emotionally involved. You experience it in a very real way.”

And just like that, Anomalisa pulled off the most heartfelt sex scene in 2015.