EntertainmentReportFilmLaika has spent 20 years building up to WildwoodHow the stop-motion animation studio blends traditional techniques with modern tech.by Andrew WebsterOct 24, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCShareGift Image: LaikaEntertainmentReportFilmLaika has spent 20 years building up to WildwoodHow the stop-motion animation studio blends traditional techniques with modern tech.by Andrew WebsterOct 24, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCShareGiftAndrew Webster is an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika.
While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. “When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing,” Deschanel says. “It was much more complicated than I expected.”Wildwood has been a long time coming. Laika CEO Travis Knight originally optioned the rights for the book of the same name, written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, in 2011. But production didn’t begin until a decade later. “I’ve been working on it in some form or another for 16 years,” Knight, who also directed Wildwood, says. “The reason why I stuck with it, the reason why I had to make this movie no matter what, is because of what it meant to me personally. Underneath it all, it’s a story about love and loss and grief, it’s about the impossible things that love asks of us, and that meant something to me personally in a very profound way.”RelatedWildwood’s director says AI is ‘antithetical to everything that we are at this studio’It’s also the biggest production Laika has ever undertaken.
Wildwood tells the story of a young girl named Prue who has to venture into the “impassable wilderness” that surrounds Portland in order to find her baby brother. When she enters the forest she discovers a fantasy realm reminiscent of Narnia, with magical spells, talking animals, and warring factions. It required nearly 50 animators and more than 200 puppets to pull it off, and the film is full of ambitious sequences, like a 12-minute battle with dozens of soldiers and a chase scene through a bustling Portland, where Prue’s brother is carried away by a gigantic murder of crows.Image: LaikaImage: LaikaAccording to head of animation Brad Schiff, the studio’s ethos involves mixing “old-school craft with modern technology.” With each project, he says, Laika develops new techniques. If something works well, they then push the idea even further on the next project.
For instance, on Laika’s previous film, Missing Link, the main character was outfitted with a diaphragm so that when an animator turned a screw on the puppet’s back, the diaphragm could expand or contract, creating the illusion that it was breathing. This has since become the standard for puppets in Laika’s films.These may sound like small details, but over the years they add up. For costume designer Deb Cook, there wasn’t a single innovation on Wildwood that stood out to her, but rather the sheer number of tools she had at her disposal. “Over time we’ve gathered together a library of techniques that we’ve been able to put into practice on this movie,” she says. This was especially important on Wildwood, which features a huge range of costumes; in the city sequences everyone is dressed in modern clothing, whereas in the forest characters have more fantastical looks.“It was much more complicated than I expected.”For Wildwood, many of the advancements came down to materials.
The costumes made use of more flexible fabrics, for example, and the team also engineered a new process for creating silicone that’s lighter and more durable than what they previously used. “We’ve done this so we can wean ourselves off of foam latex, which is stinky and it shrinks over time, and five years later it kind of just crumbles,” says Oliver Jones, head of characters and practical effects. “There are advantages to rethinking a lot of these materials that were our go-to probably since King Kong.”The scale of Wildwood has also forced the studio to adopt another seemingly much more boring practice: being better organized. “They’ve been misplaced,” Cook says, when asked if she’s ever lost a puppet. “There’s now a very sophisticated tracking system because there are so many moving parts, and so many stages around the studio.”And while much has been said about the large and elaborate sequences in the film — Knight says the epic battle scene is “probably the most technically challenging thing that we’ve ever done” — all of these techniques are designed to imbue more humanity into characters that are portrayed by puppets. In that regard, small details like the flow of fabric or the impression of breathing are vitally important.Image: LaikaImage: Laika“We also have really subtle and intimate scenes, quiet scenes that don’t have a lot of flash, that have virtually no sound design or music, where the only thing that you’re experiencing is the grief of a father talking about a secret that he’s been holding on to for 15 years, or a quiet moment of a woman grieving the loss of her son,” Knight explains. “These are moments where you have nowhere to hide and the performances of these little puppets — these little assemblages of steel and silicon and fabric that have no life of their own — completely spring to life because of the hand and the artistry of the human behind it. Those are the moments that I’m most proud of.”In this way, the long road to Wildwood hitting theaters makes a lot of sense. Laika has been around for just over 20 years, and over the course of each film the studio has innovated to steadily push its craft forward.
Knight may have been thinking about the film for 16 years, but creating the version that is coming out in 2026 wouldn’t have been possible without all of the learnings spread across films like ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings.For Knight, it’s been especially gratifying to bring it to life with a team of both Laika veterans and newcomers, including not only Deschanel but also a handful of young animators for whom Wildwood was their first feature film project. Some were young enough that Coraline, Laika’s very first film, was what inspired them to get into the field in the first place. “I was really moved by that,” says Knight. “It also made me feel old as shit.”Wildwood is in theaters now.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Andrew WebsterEntertainmentFilmReportMost PopularNow Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target adsThe first broken iPhone Duos are hereXbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few monthsPeople are vibe coding their way to better TVsNo, the iPhone Duo isn’t a small phoneAdvertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad
Leave a Reply