{"id":9315,"date":"2026-10-24T18:31:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T18:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9315"},"modified":"2026-10-24T18:31:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T18:31:41","slug":"wildwood-stop-motion-interview-laika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9315","title":{"rendered":"Laika has spent 20 years building up to Wildwood"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ<\/em> and The Patriot<\/em>, worked on sequences in The Godfather<\/em> and Titanic<\/em>, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks<\/em>. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood<\/em>, the latest release from Coraline<\/em> studio Laika<\/a>. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. \u201cWhen I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing,\u201d Deschanel says. \u201cIt was much more complicated than I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wildwood<\/em> has been a long time coming. Laika CEO Travis Knight originally optioned the rights for the book of the same name, written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, in 2011. But production didn\u2019t begin until a decade later. \u201cI\u2019ve been working on it in some form or another for 16 years,\u201d Knight, who also directed Wildwood<\/em>, says. \u201cThe reason why I stuck with it, the reason why I had to make this movie no matter what, is because of what it meant to me personally. Underneath it all, it\u2019s a story about love and loss and grief, it\u2019s about the impossible things that love asks of us, and that meant something to me personally in a very profound way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s also the biggest production Laika has ever undertaken. Wildwood<\/em> tells the story of a young girl named Prue who has to venture into the \u201cimpassable wilderness\u201d that surrounds Portland in order to find her baby brother. When she enters the forest she discovers a fantasy realm reminiscent of Narnia, with magical spells, talking animals, and warring factions. It required nearly 50 animators and more than 200 puppets to pull it off, and the film is full of ambitious sequences, like a 12-minute battle with dozens of soldiers and a chase scene through a bustling Portland, where Prue\u2019s brother is carried away by a gigantic murder of crows.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to head of animation Brad Schiff, the studio\u2019s ethos involves mixing \u201cold-school craft with modern technology.\u201d With each project, he says, Laika develops new techniques. If something works well, they then push the idea even further on the next project. For instance, on Laika\u2019s previous film, Missing Link<\/em>, the main character was outfitted with a diaphragm so that when an animator turned a screw on the puppet\u2019s back, the diaphragm could expand or contract, creating the illusion that it was breathing. This has since become the standard for puppets in Laika\u2019s films.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These may sound like small details, but over the years they add up. For costume designer Deb Cook, there wasn\u2019t a single innovation on Wildwood<\/em> that stood out to her, but rather the sheer number of tools she had at her disposal. \u201cOver time we\u2019ve gathered together a library of techniques that we\u2019ve been able to put into practice on this movie,\u201d she says. This was especially important on Wildwood<\/em>, which features a huge range of costumes; in the city sequences everyone is dressed in modern clothing, whereas in the forest characters have more fantastical looks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was much more complicated than I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For Wildwood<\/em>, many of the advancements came down to materials. The costumes made use of more flexible fabrics, for example, and the team also engineered a new process for creating silicone that\u2019s lighter and more durable than what they previously used. \u201cWe\u2019ve done this so we can wean ourselves off of foam latex, which is stinky and it shrinks over time, and five years later it kind of just crumbles,\u201d says Oliver Jones, head of characters and practical effects. \u201cThere are advantages to rethinking a lot of these materials that were our go-to probably since King Kong<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The scale of Wildwood<\/em> has also forced the studio to adopt another seemingly much more boring practice: being better organized. \u201cThey\u2019ve been misplaced,\u201d Cook says, when asked if she\u2019s ever lost a puppet. \u201cThere\u2019s now a very sophisticated tracking system because there are so many moving parts, and so many stages around the studio.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And while much has been said about the large and elaborate sequences in the film \u2014 Knight says the epic battle scene is \u201cprobably the most technically challenging thing that we\u2019ve ever done\u201d \u2014 all of these techniques are designed to imbue more humanity into characters that are portrayed by puppets. In that regard, small details like the flow of fabric or the impression of breathing are vitally important.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe also have really subtle and intimate scenes, quiet scenes that don\u2019t have a lot of flash, that have virtually no sound design or music, where the only thing that you\u2019re experiencing is the grief of a father talking about a secret that he\u2019s been holding on to for 15 years, or a quiet moment of a woman grieving the loss of her son,\u201d Knight explains. \u201cThese are moments where you have nowhere to hide and the performances of these little puppets \u2014 these little assemblages of steel and silicon and fabric that have no life of their own \u2014 completely spring to life because of the hand and the artistry of the human behind it. Those are the moments that I\u2019m most proud of.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In this way, the long road to Wildwood<\/em> hitting theaters makes a lot of sense. Laika has been around for just over 20 years, and over the course of each film the studio has innovated to steadily push its craft forward. Knight may have been thinking about the film for 16 years, but creating the version that is coming out in 2026 wouldn\u2019t have been possible without all of the learnings spread across films like ParaNorman<\/em> and Kubo and the Two Strings<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Knight, it\u2019s been especially gratifying to bring it to life with a team of both Laika veterans and newcomers, including not only Deschanel but also a handful of young animators for whom Wildwood<\/em> was their first feature film project. Some were young enough that Coraline<\/em>, Laika\u2019s very first film, was what inspired them to get into the field in the first place. \u201cI was really moved by that,\u201d says Knight. \u201cIt also made me feel old as shit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wildwood is in theaters now.<\/em><\/sub><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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