So you can imagine what it takes to make a movie that runs over two hours. Or maybe you can’t, because even after nearly two decades of pushing the limits of stop-motion animation, LAIKA’s Wildwood, arriving in theaters October 23, is unlike anything ever attempted before.
Since introducing audiences to its eerie and enchanting brand of stop-motion animation with Coraline in 2009, the studio has only grown more ambitious. Wildwood is a project 16 years(!) in the making. As LAIKA CEO and Wildwood director Travis Knight explains, "The reason it took so long is because I was waiting until our shop had developed the tools, techniques and tricks that would allow us to pull off a movie of this scale." But even once the studio was ready, production itself took 7 years. "Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. It’s like continental drift," Knight says.
Based on a fantasy book series written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis, the movie follows Prue, a young girl who ventures into an enchanted forest to rescue her baby brother after he’s abducted by a murder of crows. Joined by her classmate Curtis, she enters a hidden world of talking animals and warring factions.
More than 1,000 creatives contributed to the production, which involved over 140,000 interchangeable puppet faces and more than 130 elaborate sets built on a 100,000-square-foot stage. But don’t mistake LAIKA’s commitment to handmade animation for an aversion to technology. The studio combines traditional stop-motion techniques with practical effects, miniatures, computer-generated imagery, and digital visual effects, often using modern innovations to expand the possibilities of a centuries-old art form. Every frame — 24 per second, to be exact — is the product of an extraordinary amount of work and a remarkable degree of collaboration, all to create the illusion that these painstakingly constructed characters and worlds are alive.
Take the General, a giant eagle voiced by Angela Bassett. Birds are incredibly difficult to animate in stop-motion, since their feathers constantly shift and change shape. And if animating one bird sounds complicated, imagine coordinating 3,000 characters in a 12-minute battle scene. The sequence, which consists of over 400 individual shots, took years to realize. The battlefield set was broken into 5 pieces, with production designer Nelson Lowry noting that, if all 5 were combined, it "wouldn’t fit in the building."
For all its fantastical elements, Wildwood has familiar roots. Meloy and Ellis drew inspiration for the original book series from Portland, Oregon’s sprawling Forest Park. As it happens, LAIKA has called the Portland area home since its founding, making this a particularly special project for the studio. And beneath the elaborate environments and technical wizardry is a story about grief, love, and empathy. As Knight puts it, "The thing that has to matter to you is the heart and soul of the story underneath everything." Ultimately, that’s what makes all this meticulous work worthwhile.
At a time when technology promises to make just about anything faster and easier, LAIKA is doing something extraordinarily difficult, simply because its artists believe the result is worth the effort. "Today you can generate worlds or video with a prompt,” Knight observes. “In that environment, making a stop-motion film feels like a quiet act of rebellion." Every second represents countless decisions made by real people, whose individual imaginations and elbow grease have come together to create something none of them could have made alone. Wildwood is a testament to what human creativity can accomplish when given the time, resources, and freedom to run wild.
