New WILDWOOD Trailer Shows Off Laika’s Most Ambitious Stop-Motion Movie Yet
Laika is finally heading back to theaters, and it looks like the studio spent its six-year absence building something absolutely enormous.
The new trailer for Wildwood has arrived, offering our best look yet at a stop-motion fantasy adventure that seems determined to push the medium into territory we rarely get to see.
Directed by Travis Knight, Wildwood follows a young girl named Prue, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, whose baby brother is snatched away by a murder of crows. Determined to get him back, Prue sets off on a rescue mission with her classmate Curtis, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, and the two venture into a forbidden forest just outside Portland, Oregon.
What they find there is an entire hidden world packed with talking animals, bandits, strange creatures, powerful characters, and plenty of danger. Prue's personal mission to save her brother eventually pulls her into a much larger conflict, with the future of the forest itself hanging in the balance.
The film is based on the fantasy novel Wildwood written by Colin Meloy, frontman for The Decembrists, and illustrated by Carson Ellis. Laika has called the adaptation its most ambitious production yet, and after watching this trailer, that's pretty easy to believe.
Laika chief marketing and operations officer David Burke previously explained just how huge the production has become:
“It means that we’ve got 136 locations in the feature, and many of them are so large that the crew can walk through them. There’s 231 practical puppets, 54 hero characters, and each and every one of them has been engineered and costumed like a bespoke work of art.”
Those numbers are wild for a stop-motion production, but the scale really comes through in the footage. We know we're watching stop-motion animation. This is Laika, after all. But there are moments in the trailer where it's difficult to wrap your head around how the team actually pulled this stuff off practically.
The faces are incredibly expressive, the hair and clothing have an impressive amount of detail, and the environments look huge and alive.
Then the trailer starts throwing battle sequences at us with dozens of characters appearing onscreen together. Just thinking about the amount of time, patience, engineering, and frame-by-frame work required to make those sequences happen is ridiculous.
The movie looks stunning. More importantly, Wildwood doesn't appear to be using all that technical wizardry simply to show off. The massive environments give this forbidden world a real sense of scale, while the character work still retains the handcrafted personality that makes Laika movies instantly recognizable.
It's also a pretty massive swing for the studio. A stop-motion fantasy adventure of this size can't be cheap or easy to make, and Wildwood looks like the kind of project where Laika decided to see just how far it could push its artists and technology. If the finished movie delivers on what we're seeing in this trailer, that risk could pay off in a big way.
Wildwood also brings Knight back to animation. His previous animated directing effort was Kubo and the Two Strings in 2016, one of Laika's best films and a movie that earned Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects.
It's been a long wait for another Laika feature. The studio's most recent film was Missing Link in 2019, which went on to win the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature.
Awards attention could be waiting for Wildwood as well. Laika already has a strong history with the Oscars. Kubo and the Two Strings earned its two nominations, while Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls each received Best Animated Feature nominations during their respective years.
The voice cast is also loaded with great talent. Joining Lee and Tremblay are Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Richard E. Grant, Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Tom Waits, and Charlie Day.
After six years without a new Laika movie, Wildwood looks like one hell of a way for the studio to return. It's strange, adventurous, beautifully handcrafted, and operating on a scale that seems almost absurd for stop-motion animation.
Wildwood opens in theaters October 23 through Fathom Entertainment.