It’s been a long road to Laika’s latest release, “Wildwood.” Seven years since their last release, “Missing Link,” this marks the longest gap between releases in the studio’s history. But walking around their soundstage in Portland, Oregon, it’s clear why Laika took their time bringing the fantastical world of “Wildwood” to life. This adventure is their biggest swing to date: deeply grounded in humanity, with odes to Portland, and a fantasy world full of animal soldiers and bird kidnappers. At 131 minutes long, it’s also the longest stop-motion feature film in cinema history, no small feat when the studio averaged 1.8 seconds of animation per week.
As “Wildwood” hits theaters later this month from Fathom Events, Laika invited Next Best Picture to their studio to hear more about the handcrafted elements that brought the film to life.
As you walk through the soundstages, the massive scale and intricate detail overwhelm you. Every nook and cranny is filled in, populating each set with more detail than will ever be seen in the final product. There are simpler ways to make an animated movie, and thousands of shortcuts they could take along the way. But as numerous animators and craftspeople showed us around the studio, they each kept pointing to director & Laika CEO Travis Knight’s guiding philosophy: to give audiences an experience unlike any other. “We don’t do it because it’s easier,” describes Brian McLean, Laika’s director of rapid prototyping. “We do it because of the illusion, because it feels like something you’ve never seen before.” At every stage of production, from developing technologies to costume design to animation, they never chose the easiest route, but the one that would bring a new level of authenticity and imagination.
Producer Sam Wilson noted the new scale needed for “Wildwood,” especially compared to their previous films. “‘Coraline’ took place in a house,” he says. “‘ParaNorman’ was a town, ‘The Boxtrolls’ was a city, ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’ was a country, while ‘Missing Link‘ essentially took place across the globe. And now, ‘Wildwood’ gets even bigger.”
That new level of scale shows in the breathtaking, inventive technologies Laika uses on “Wildwood.” While “Coraline,” Laika’s first film, uses many replaceable facial expressions throughout the movie, “Wildwood” uses bespoke, 3D-printed faces for every frame. This allows greater emotional depth and detail, particularly for the lead character, Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee). In fact, Laika set the Guinness World Record for the most individual faces used in a stop-motion film, with about 142,000 faces in the movie, or roughly 24 faces per second a human is on screen. The studio pushed this precision even further, revolutionizing how human bodies could be portrayed. Metal armatures, essentially the posable skeletons inside stop-motion characters, haven’t changed much since “King Kong” in 1933. Laika still utilizes those armatures as a base, but adds small cords and silicone underneath the characters’ skin to show musculature. You can literally see biceps shifting and flexing underneath the skin of these models.
Notably, despite the numerous technological advances Laika has made over the years, the company has declined to patent them. McLean, who received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award in 2016 for the 3D printing and rapid prototyping tech, noted that Knight wants others to use these same advancements and make more great art with them. ShadowMachine, another Portland stop-motion studio headed up by former Laika animators, uses much of the same technology in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”. It’s rare to walk into a studio and feel that art rules the day, not financial concerns.
Yes, this is a handcrafted film, but Laika isn’t shy about the amount of computer graphics needed to bring it all together. Wilson noted that “Wildwood” contains 1800 CG-affected shots, and roughly 47 purely CG shots. “It keeps us honest,” Wilson says, referring to combining real stop-motion elements with computer animation. “You can tell, so the visual effects have to truly match the handcrafted pieces.” To that end, legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel was brought on to add his live-action sensibility to the look of the picture. “You won’t really know what’s CG and practical, and that’s intentional,” he says.
Along the tour, Laika took us behind one of the many curtains separating their various sets, revealing an enormous forest that seemed to stretch back hundreds of feet, with Prue strolling down a path in the center. This is just one of the many jaw-dropping sets required to immerse the audience in this world. Of course, some of these sets used green screen in the deep background, but the scale of the tangible locations is stunning. In one, St. Johns, a Portland neighborhood, comes to life with an entire street full of real and fictional shops. Portland staple Voodoo Doughnut makes a cameo, while the fictional Caleb’s Cameras winks at Deschanel’s work on the film. Around every corner of the soundstage was another massive set, overwhelming us with the scale.
Early in the day, as Wilson chatted with us about the film, someone asked the inevitable, if eye-rolling, question about artificial intelligence. Does Laika see a use for generative AI? Wouldn’t that be faster, easier? For anyone familiar with Laika’s approach, of course, the answer is obvious. “When you choose that route, you cut the corner of a collaboration,” Wilson said, referring to using AI to supplement their animation. Artist collaboration is their top priority and the key to their success. Using generative models would undercut the handcrafted feel in every frame.
With a PG-13 rating and a 131-minute runtime, the commercial prospects are understandably tough. Most animated films rely on families to generate the big bucks and repeat viewings, but Laika clearly didn’t let this deter them. This is animation made for humans, not just kids. It’s art made to show us something we’ve never seen before, and that’s the whole point. Few are doing it like Laika, and bringing us to fantastical places like this. Getting to touch and feel the sets, the costumes, the skin, the trees…the fantasy of “Wildwood” feels shockingly grounded.
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