“Wildwood,” Laika’s latest stop-motion marvel, might be set in the studio’s home base of Portland, Oregon, but it took France by storm when the first footage from the movie was screened at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival last week.
Outside of the film’s marvelous trailer, this was the first time any footage had been shared, with director Travis Knight (and CEO and president of Laika) admitting that he was a little nervous to show off unfinished footage to an audience outside of the studio. He shouldn’t have been worried.
In the first clip, we’re introduced to Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), and her family (her parents are voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine). She has a baby brother named Mac, who her father warns her is not allowed to go outside. She agrees, and of course, promptly takes him outside. Bits of this sequence can be seen in the spellbinding trailer for the movie, as Prue takes him out into Portland, where you see bits of actual Portland culture — including, much to the delight of the Annecy crowd, the guy who rides around on a unicycle dressed as Darth Vader and playing a bagpipe. (He is known as the Unipiper and he is very real.)
Prue eventually meets up with her friend Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) and, while at a playground, she is confronted by a flock (a murder!) of crows, who abduct young Mac, taking him into the unknown. This is the beginning of our adventure, a classic fantasy hallmark – a human character is spirited away to another realm and our human heroine has to follow.
There are definitely shades of Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” in the set-up for “Wildwood,” which is based on a book by the husband-and-wife team of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis. Knight said that he had reached out to Meloy and Ellis even before the book had been published about turning it into an animated film. “That was 16 years ago,” Knight said.
After this clip, Knight talked about the various disciplines that Laika uses to bring these sequences to life. “We’re not Amish,” he joked about using computer animation to augment the stop-motion. He called the movie a mixture of “art, craft and technology” and “a combination of different disciplines.” And just seeing the footage unfinished you could feel this – sometimes the puppets are being animated against green screens and composited into photography of the built sets; other times the characters are computer-generated within one of those built sets; and yet other times everything is stop-motion, without much assistance from computers besides removing rods or painting out bits of machinery.
It takes a village to make any movie. With “Wildwood,” it seems to have taken whole continents.
The second clip showed Curtis being interrogated by some of the warriors in the other realm beyond the Impassable Wilderness. They ask him if he is a warrior, to which he fumbles. He is then introduced to Proxima (a talking rat voiced by Awkwafina). We watch as the rat does backstrokes in Curtis’ soup; it’s a delightful bit of character animation and example of how well Laika knows how to match the animator with the character.
Knight actually expanded on this idea after the clip ran; unlike in traditional animation, animators at Laika animate everything in the shot. They aren’t merely responsible for the character but everything around the character, other characters that come into the shot – all of it. “It’s all up to the animator,” Knight explained.
The cinematography of “Wildwood” was handled by the legendary, Oscar-winning Caleb Deschanel, who also had to learn a few things about the stop-motion animation process. Knight said that Deschanel asked, “What if we shoot this outside?” Knight (kindly) had to inform Deschanel that shooting outside was not an option.
The third and final clip of the presentation was a sequence between Prue and the General (Angela Bassett), a giant golden eagle that is one of the big technological and artistic feats of “Wildwood.” The puppet is huge, with hundreds of individually crafted feathers that have to be manipulated by hand. The eagle also “breathes,” thanks to a new technology that Laika employs to raise and lower the chests of the stop-motion characters.
The clip, Knight explained, was from about halfway through the movie and featured Prue flying on the back of the eagle as they have a conversation. She is bringing Prue to some Wildwood residents who the General thinks can help. They will be around a mythic tree.
“They talk to a tree?” Prue asks.
“Yes.”
“Hippies,” Prue sneers.
Of course, the crows are on the General’s tail, which could mean doom for her and Prue. The “Wildwood” presentation did a great job of mixing details about the film’s lengthy production with clips from the final movie, in a way that illuminated the story without giving anything away. “Wildwood” is a different kind of fairy tale, a bedtime story for kids in 2026, where danger is lurking around every corner and growing up could make you more – not less – vulnerable to threats both earthly and ethereal.
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