WILDWOOD Pushed Laika Beyond Its Limits as Travis Knight Admits the Studio Wasn't Ready
Laika has spent more than two decades pushing the boundaries of stop-motion animation, but its latest film, Wildwood, presented challenges even the experienced studio wasn't fully prepared to tackle.
Director Travis Knight, who previously helmed Kubo and the Two Strings, recently opened up about how the project forced the studio to develop new techniques and expand what it could accomplish with stop-motion.
In an interview with /Film, Knight reflected on the evolution of the studio's filmmaking process and how technology has helped keep the traditional animation medium alive.
He explained: “Well, we've actually integrated visual effects and technology from the very beginning. In fact, when I go back to the genesis of Laika, I think back to when all this started [...]
“At the time, stop-motion was dying. Stop-motion was an art form that didn't seem to have a future because everything that we could do in stop-motion, the computer could do better. It could do it faster. It could do it cheaper. It could do it with greater precision.
“So I remember having this hard conversation with myself, which is like, ‘How can stop-motion continue to live and maybe even flourish in this modern era?’ And it was by essentially embracing the author of our demise, the infernal machine — the thing that was trying to take all of our jobs, all of our livelihoods, away from us.
“If we could somehow try to figure out a way to integrate the technology into the process, maybe we could find a way that we could live together. It was a bit like a Luddite embracing a loom.
“And when I took a further step back, I realized that a computer is just another tool, just like a pencil or a paintbrush, a 3D printer. So from the very, very beginning, we integrated art, craft, science, and technology into the process of making these things.”
That has helped define Laika's approach to animation, combining handcrafted puppets and physical environments with modern digital tools.
Knight went on to explain how every production expanded the studio's abilities, eventually giving the team the confidence to tackle Wildwood.
“There were a ton of technological innovations that came to bear on Coraline, many things that had never been done in the medium before, and it was because of the integration of those things.
“And with every film we've done, we've had further technological advancement, further craftsmanship advantages and advancements and learnings. Tools, techniques, tricks that we develop with every single film, that we then can apply to the next film. Things that used to be impossible, now we do as a matter of course.
“So when we got to the point five films in, I felt like finally we've developed a big enough toolkit where we can take on a film of this scale in Wildwood. This was seven years ago, and I said, ‘All right, guys, we're going to do this thing. We're ready.’
“But Ben, we were not ready, and we had to grow and we had to learn and we had to suffer in the process and also hopefully become good enough that we were worthy of what the film was asking of us.”
I like that Knight is so open about the fact that the studio underestimated just how difficult the project would be. There's something exciting about filmmakers taking on a creative challenge that forces them to figure things out as they go.
Laika has continued to evolve with every movie, from Coraline to Kubo and the Two Strings, and it's clear that Wildwood demanded another major leap forward.
The studio could have played things safe, but Knight seems far more interested in discovering what stop-motion animation is capable of when the artists are pushed beyond what they've done before.
That's a big reason why I love what Laika is doing with their films so much. Every production feels like an opportunity to attempt something that wasn't possible the last time around.