WILDWOOD Features Stop-Motion Puppets With Actual Moving Muscles, and That's Pretty Awesome
Laika has done some incredible things with stop-motion animation over the years, but director Travis Knight and his team came up with some particularly wild innovations for their new fantasy adventure, Wildwood.
Among them are puppets with functioning muscles underneath their skin and a giant golden eagle constructed almost entirely out of fabric.
During an interview with /Film, Knight discussed some of the unusual engineering challenges his team encountered while bringing the movie's creatures and characters to life.
One of the biggest challenges involved a giant golden eagle named The General. The team couldn't build the character using the studio's traditional materials because the puppet would have been too heavy for the animators to manipulate.
Knight explained: “Historically, we tend to make these things out of silicone, which is the material that most closely resembles human skin and the way that it interacts with light. But we couldn't have made The General with silicone because it would've been too heavy. The animator would not have been strong enough to physically move the puppet because there was so much material, it would've been too heavy to move. So we had to come up with a new way to fabricate that puppet.
“Essentially, the thing is almost entirely made out of fabric, which is kind of an insane way to think about making a puppet. And its neck is essentially like a Slinky. It's not a typical jointed puppet. It's basically a Slinky that can move. Birds are shape-shifters.”
That's a pretty crazy piece of puppet engineering, but it wasn't the only challenge Knight threw at his team. Because Wildwood features so much physical action, he wanted the characters' bodies to respond more realistically during movement and combat. That meant finding a way to give stop-motion puppets something resembling actual muscles.
Knight recalled: “I think about some of the normal puppets that we made, the human puppets that we made, because a lot of this film is about physical effort and exertion and violence and battle and war.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn't it be great if these characters really felt fully alive? And when they moved, that you had a sense of musculature underneath the skin?’ And so I remember talking to Ollie Jones, our head of puppets, and I said, ‘Hey, Ollie, can we actually get muscles in these puppets?’ And he looked at me like I had lost my f***ing mind and I saw him sag under the weight of it.
“And then I saw the little genius hamster wheel in his head start to turn, and he figured out how to put muscles inside a puppet. So when a character bends their arm to strike another character, you can see the muscles actually bulge.
“And it's the kind of thing and it's the kind of attention to detail where you don't necessarily notice it, but the accumulation of all these details, these well-observed details, make the world feel alive and real in a way that it wouldn't ordinarily.”
It's that kind of dedication to the smallest details that makes Laika's movies so impressively awesome. Most audiences probably won't consciously notice a puppet's muscles flexing during a fight, but those subtle movements can make a huge difference in how believable a character feels.
That's what I love about stop-motion. These aren't simply digital characters moving around on a computer screen. They're physical creations that talented artists have painstakingly engineered and animated frame by frame.
Knowing the kind of work that went into bringing these characters to life makes me even more excited to see what Knight and his team have accomplished with Wildwood.