Inside Wildwood, the Stop-Motion Epic LAIKA Built Out of Portland

LAIKA spent fifteen years trying to make Wildwood, and for most of them it looked like the universe was voting no. On Friday, October 23, it finally opens in theaters across the country.

It is the longest stop-motion feature ever made, the biggest world the Hillsboro studio has ever built, and the first time LAIKA has turned its cameras on its own hometown. Portland, in miniature, by hand. We’ve been waiting for this one!

The story comes from the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy, the singer of the Decemberists, and the illustrator Carson Ellis, who wrote it together while living in a Southeast Portland warehouse.

Twelve-year-old Prue McKeel is out with her baby brother Mac when a murder of crows carries him off into Forest Park, which in this telling is the edge of the Impassable Wilderness: a hidden country of talking animals, bandits, a coyote army and a witch named Alexandra. Prue goes in after him. Her classmate Curtis tags along, mostly because he can’t help himself.

Travis Knight, LAIKA’s chief executive and the director of Kubo and the Two Strings, directs. Chris Butler, who made ParaNorman, wrote the script. Caleb Deschanel, the cinematographer behind The Right Stuff and The Natural, shot it. And the voices belong to Peyton Elizabeth Lee as Prue, Jacob Tremblay as Curtis, Carey Mulligan as Alexandra, Angela Bassett as a golden eagle called The General, plus Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant, Jemaine Clement, Charlie Day and Jake Johnson.

A Portland we already know, rebuilt at half size

LAIKA has made five features since 2009, and every one of them was nominated for the Oscar for best animated feature. None of them was set here. Coraline lived somewhere in rural Oregon and Missing Link wandered the Pacific Northwest, but this is the first time the studio has looked out its own front door. The film opens on the Pittock Mansion. A few minutes later Prue is riding her bike through Old Town, past Powell’s and along Tom McCall Waterfront Park to Loretta Lynn singing “Portland Oregon,” with the cherry trees in full bloom.

Here’s the part we love. The art department built exactly one of those cherry trees for real, petal by petal, then scanned it so the effects team could plant the rest of the row. The riverside path is only as long as Prue needed to pedal. The buildings behind her were made smaller, photographed, scanned and set back into the frame. It’s a sleight of hand that only works because there was a real object to start from.

Then there’s the Benson Bubbler. Anyone who has walked downtown knows the four-bowl bronze drinking fountains Simon Benson gave the city in 1912. LAIKA’s rapid prototyping team, the people who 3D print thousands of puppet faces, printed the water too. Each little arc is a replacement part, swapped out frame by frame so it looks like it’s flowing.

Look closely at the coffee shop on Prue’s corner. It’s called Dripsters, which also happens to be the name of the coffee bar inside LAIKA’s own offices. A small inside joke, and exactly the kind of thing you’d only bother with if you loved the place.

Production designer Nelson Lowry has said that when he moved to Portland the city struck him as a kind of ready-made model railroad, with its gardens and bridges and an extinct volcano all stitched together by bike paths. He just turned the color up. A few of those bridges made it in, and a key twist plays out at the fog-wrapped foot of the St. Johns Bridge. When a trailer played at the St. Johns Twin Cinema, a few blocks from the real thing, the audience started clapping at the sight of it.

In the film, the Wilderness has a government, and a bad one, headquartered in a Pittock Mansion that’s a little taller and a lot more castle-like than the 1914 house in the West Hills. LAIKA built it at half scale. Half scale! The set still stands almost thirteen feet tall, which is the best answer we’ve heard to anyone who thinks stop-motion means tiny.

Into Wildwood’s Impassable Wilderness

Cross into the woods and the whole film changes texture. Art director Matthew Maldonado, who spent five years designing and building the sets, describes two worlds designed to feel subtly different down to the props. Our favorite line from the press tour is his: A cup in Wildwood feels different from a cup in Portland.

The forest sets are huge. Many sit on platforms that split apart and roll away so animators can climb inside, and the studio now lights them with LEDs that can run for thousands of hours without cooking the puppets, which older, hotter stage lights used to do. Every fern was placed by someone sitting cross-legged on the floor of a soundstage.

Out here Prue meets the bandits, including their leader Brendan on horseback, and eventually Alexandra, whom Carey Mulligan plays as something sadder and more complicated than a fairy tale witch. Her candlelit lair is one of the loveliest rooms LAIKA has ever dressed.

The first LAIKA film full of birds

Birds are hard. Feathers catch the light, ruffle when you breathe on them and refuse to sit still between frames, which is one reason stop-motion has historically stayed earthbound. Wildwood is the first LAIKA film to put them front and center, with crows, owls and an entire Avian Principality. The artists studied real birds closely, wingbeat by wingbeat, before animating them.

The showpiece is The General, the golden eagle voiced by Angela Bassett. Her puppet carries about 9,000 feathers, every one of them set in by hand. Think about that the next time you see her bank through a sunset for two seconds of screen time!

Asked how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital, Maldonado’s answer was that every single thing was made by hand. Anything not shot in camera on a stage was still built by the art department first, then scanned or used as reference for the effects team. LAIKA is open about the computers, too. Producer Sam Wilson has put the count at roughly 1,800 shots touched by CG and around 47 that are fully digital, mostly to stretch a set past the edge of the stage or to paint out a rig. The rest is puppets, moved a hair at a time and photographed one frame at a time.

Under the faces is a clockwork of gears, and under the costumes are steel skeletons with tiny ball joints. This time the puppet makers added cords and silicone under the skin so the muscles move when a character does. Hair is its own department. Costumes are sewn at a scale where a single stitch reads as a seam.

Screenwriter Chris Butler has said he hopes the film becomes a rallying cry against AI in animation, then laughed that he might be getting ahead of himself. Maybe. But it’s hard to watch a person lie on their stomach in the dirt to nudge a toy truck’s headlight a millimeter and not feel something about where this kind of work is headed, and why it’s worth paying to see.

Fifteen years, a pandemic and a missed release date

Meloy and Ellis were around 25 when they started the manuscript that became Wildwood, and they’ve admitted the first version was wildly inappropriate for kids. Ten years and five Decemberists albums later, a cleaned-up (still pretty dark) version spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2011. When studios came calling, the couple half-jokingly said they’d only agree to a film done in hand-drawn cel animation like Watership Down, or in stop-motion. They thought that was a polite no. Then LAIKA, twenty minutes up the road, raised its hand.

LAIKA optioned the book weeks after it came out in 2011. Knight read it while producing ParaNorman and knew right away it was bigger than the studio could handle. Directors came and went. Preproduction finally started in March 2020, the same month the world shut down, which is a rough time to begin a film made entirely of things people have to touch. A 2025 release slipped to this fall. At one point, Knight says, he wondered whether the universe was telling them not to make it.

Meloy has only seen a rough cut, and he came away awed by the sheer labor of it. His comparison is a big one: It felt like a David Lean movie. Ellis, for her part, says she’d draw the book differently now. She painted Forest Park blue instead of green, for one. The film went green. We think it chose well.

So, is Wildwood any good?

We haven’t seen the finished film yet, so we’ll let the people who have speak. Wildwood premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11 to a run of raves, and reports after the premiere had it at a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, ahead of Kubo and Coraline. Critics keep reaching for the same words: astonishing, rapturous, the most beautiful stop-motion film yet. A few noted, a little wistfully, that it isn’t as frightening as Coraline.

Two honest caveats. It’s LAIKA’s first PG-13 film, and reviewers say it earns that rating early, with a battle, real deaths and a scene some called traumatic, so think about the very youngest viewers. And it’s long. Depending on whom you ask, the runtime lands somewhere between 132 and 140 minutes, which makes it the longest stop-motion feature ever made, comfortably past the 117 minutes of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Stay for the credits. LAIKA traditionally slips a behind-the-scenes glimpse in there, and it’s the best magic trick in the building.

If you need more handmade animation in your life, start with our history of claymation and the films that shaped the form, go back to our 2012 look at LAIKA’s ParaNorman, or spend a few minutes with the best horror movie posters ever made. And if the forest scenes have you itching to walk Forest Park this weekend, our fall color map says the timing is good.

All images and footage © LAIKA, used for editorial coverage of the film. Animated clips were made by us from LAIKA’s official final trailer.

By Moss & Fog Staff