Wildwood's Supernatural Magic Maintains The Human Touch Thanks To LAIKA Studios

Published Sep 16, 2026, 8:31 AM EDT

As a graduate of Columbia University in New York City, Tatiana studied theater and comparative literature. She has been passionate about all manner of storytelling from Jane Austen adaptations to anime. Aside from writing for Screen Rant, she co-hosts podcasts: The Flash Podcast and Ladies With Gumption.

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LAIKA is committed to keeping human creativity at the heart of its innovation, and Wildwood is perfect proof of that. The studio's upcoming stop-motion adventure, directed by CEO Travis Knight and written by Chris Butler, sees Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) on a mission to rescue her baby brother after he is kidnapped by crows and taken into the Impassable Wilderness. What follows is a breathtaking adventure filled with talking animals and magical-but-tragic figures who are only made possible thanks to the unflinching devotion of hundreds of artists to their craft.

Not only are these artists standing strong in the face of increasing automation, but they are also continuing to evolve the scale of their cinematic storytelling from one movie to the next. The number of shots in Wildwood is double that of 2019's Missing Link, and the studio makes sure to apply the lessons learned in one film to the next, expanding their discoveries and applying them in the way that best suits their stories and characters. The final trailer (which dropped today) highlights not only the breathtaking visuals, but the impressive subtlety of each character's emotions, showcasing how LAIKA keeps outdoing itself with each project.

At the end of July, ScreenRant had the opportunity to visit LAIKA Studios just outside Portland, Oregon, where they and several other media outlets got to peek behind the curtain and into the inner world of Wildwood. Walking through the halls of the studio felt like first being transported through the busy streets of the city before adventuring deep within the woods themselves, as maquettes and mockups of the characters and settings proved just how much attention to detail is shown at every step of the way.

Screenwriter Chris Butler, Costume Designer Deborah Cook, Director of Practical Effects Oliver Jones, Production Designer Nelson Lowry, Director of Rapid Prototyping Brian McLean, and Head of Animation Brad Schiff each had some unique insight to offer into the painstaking yet beautiful process of bringing Wildwood to life. Additionally, actors Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay shared some of their experience voicing Prue and Curtis.

Cook opened the tour with a detailed look at how she designed the costumes for Wildwood, starting with the everyday look of protagonist Prue and her trusty sidekick Curtis. As shown in the BTS clip above, graciously provided by LAIKA, Wildwood begins grounded in the ordinary world, which is shown through the eyes of a young yet mature Prue.

The costume designer described 13-year-old Prue as "sassy, super cool, and slightly overconfident." The fact that "she thinks she knows everything" is reflected in her outfits, and the iconic profile of her blue coat remains a staple of the story despite her circumstances changing greatly. "Her silhouette pretty much stays similar throughout the movie because she's quite a strong character," Cook explained. "Whereas Curtis's takes a little bit of a shift."

When it came to the inspirations for the extraordinary looks of characters like Alexandra and other Wildwood inhabitants, Cook pointed to Carson Ellis' illustrations for the original novel as inspiration. "Her illustrations are more about mark-making and gesture. They're very elegant and reduced, edited versions of things." Foliage, for example, is a leitmotif that translated very well onscreen. "We have a character that has some tattoos, and they're leaves."

It's clear how much thought goes into even the most minute of costume details, such as the knitwear Prue's baby brother Mac starts with, which Cook revealed is "a story point thread between him and his dad." Mac's father (voiced by Jake Johnson) knits clothing for his son as a protective measure. "It's a family identity that runs through them that, when he's kidnapped, he loses all of that. Then he's just wearing diapers and swaddling, and all his family identity and protection is just stripped away from him."

On the practical side, she shared that certain looks (such as Curtis' rain-streaked parka) were created using dye sublimation to apply heat, incorporating the visuals into the surface texture in order to create duplicates across many puppets throughout the movie. Animals were particularly complicated, and Cook confirmed that "we're not replicating fur" for their costumes, instead focusing on the natural elements they would draw from - as well as how Alexandra's influence affects their overall look.

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Jones walked press through the puppetry, which is at the heart of LAIKA's stop-motion animation and a crucial element of Wildwood. Using Curtis as an example, he explains that the character starts off as a maquette, a 3D rendition of the puppet, which "gives us our silhouette, our size, and our volumes." That and the character paint "are the two main pieces of information that we need as builders," which then allow the creation of the storyboards and puppet sculpts.

"It's a defrocked puppet, which we're then going to use in fabrication to build the rest," Jones continued. Inside the puppet is an armature, which is essentially a skeleton. "It sits inside the puppet underneath silicone, and it's the main tool for the animators to express the emotions of the puppet." Made out of steel balls and sockets, hinges, and screws, perhaps the most fascinating thing about the armature is that it "hasn't really changed since King Kong," according to Jones, "but we've been able to elevate the techniques and make the best tool possible to get lifelike performance."

LAIKA shoots on ones, "which means that we shoot every single frame of film," resulting in a smoother performance. Such a performance is enabled by what Jones calls a jetpack, which first began life on 2016's Kubo and the Two Strings. Not only can it help animators work faster, but it allows movement to take place in increments so small that they can't be perceived on their frame grabbers. He demonstrated how Alexandra's chest can move in and out, simulating breathing, before dropping an incredible fact about the studio's animation evolution: "Three characters on Missing Link got breathers, while 90% of the characters on Wildwood get breathers. When we've found something that really works, we make sure we extrapolate that across the whole show."

Conversations With Wildwood's Creatives

Credit: LAIKA

In speaking with Butler, ScreenRant and fellow media outlets went back to the first days of Knight's decision to adapt Wildwood. Butler revealed that he had his own questions when the project was first discussed, but quickly illuminated the angle that the creative team aimed to take:

Chris Butler: We think we've heard this story before, of a child crossing a magical threshold into a fantastical world. When I first heard about the project from Travis, it was like, "What's LAIKA's version of that?" Because we know Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Narnia, and we've even done it with Coraline.

What can we do with Wildwood that is embracing these fantasy tropes and playing with that imagination, but doing it in a daring way? [We're] doing it in maybe a more subversive way and really bringing something to the screen that we haven't done before.

Butler began adapting Wildwood after he finished Paranorman, and the screenwriter admitted that the challenge was "pretty daunting" at first. He spoke to both Knight and author Colin Meloy to get to the heart of the story, and to facilitate its transition from page to screen, and he shared some of his feelings about the process.

Everything I'd written up to then was my own stuff, so adapting something that pre-existed was a great challenge. I also thought it was a great challenge to take something that was so dense and try to [understand] what makes it Wildwood. What is the potential about it that I can bring to a cinematic adaptation that can be two hours long?

I thought that was a really fun process. Personally, I believe that if you're going to adapt a book to a movie, make the book. Otherwise, why are you doing it? I was trying to stay true to the book as much as possible. Obviously, I had to tweak a few things. There's a magnificent flight and action sequence, and I took kernels from the book, then made it in the most cinematic way possible. But, essentially, I was trying to do right by the book.

The medium of stop-motion presents its own kind of challenge, but Butler was quick to point out that Knight's edict at LAIKA has always been "Don't let the medium dictate the writing."

If I'm writing something that I know is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve in stop-motion, it enters my head, but I still do it because we've always figured out a way to do it.

Wildwood in particular is definitely the most technically ambitious thing we've ever done. I feel like we say that every time. Every time we bring out a movie, we say, "This is the biggest thing we've ever done." And it's always true. From one movie to the next, we're trying things, we're innovating, and we're taking that through to the next movie.

10 years ago, we couldn't have made Wildwood. I think even when I wrote the first draft, which was 2014, I knew that a lot of what I was writing was going to be incredibly difficult to achieve. But it's never stopped me. No one's ever stopped me at this point.

Schiff, who oversees animation, understood the challenges posed by Wildwood all too well, and he broke down what made the newest stop-motion project so complicated.

Brad Schiff: Missing Link had 1800 shots in the film. This one had 2,900, and 900 of them were a second or less. It's shot and edited like a live-action film, but it takes just as long to set up a 12-frame shot as it does a 120-frame shot, except the animator will finish it in two days. It's just a lot of setup time.

Despite the fact that LAIKA "hadn't experienced anything like that before," Schiff detailed how the team prepared to capture both the fast-paced action sequences and nuanced moments of emotion.

It was a challenge overseeing that stuff and getting those things ready and just getting your head around all of these short shots, because not every shot has a beginning and a middle and an end. So much of these shots were just middle, and that's a hard thing for an animator to get their head around, where you're just doing a thing that connects. It's animating connective tissue a lot, which I think was new, but that's also what led to everything feeling so kinetic because it's quick cutting.

Image via Laika

Lowry, who handled the production design, expressed the roller coaster ride of actually seeing such a challenging film brought to life after so many years of work.

Nelson Lowry: It's very emotional for me. I mean, to move a film like this forward and keep it consistent and do it for six years? It's indescribably challenging. And then you're finally there, and so much comes up, good and bad, happy and sad. I mean, all you want to do is finish it, and then it's over!

Despite the mixed emotions of the moment, he confidently exclaimed, "Wildwood's been the most positive [experience] for me, where I just felt proud. I haven't really had that level of confidence watching a movie before."

The years between inception and release are similarly evident in the ages of lead voice actors Lee and Tremblay, who voiced the roles of Prue and Curtis at a rather different stage of their lives. But they're equally as excited as the rest of the creative team to see their hard work brought to life and out in theaters in 2026. Tremblay, in particular, was reeling from his first-ever visit to the studios. "You don't realize how big the actual sets are until you see it in person," he said. "It's crazy."

Lee, who began her recording sessions in 2021, revealed that she walked in totally fresh when she first began - not even seeing a hint of concept art.

Peyton Elizabeth Lee: Either they hadn't done anything yet, or they didn't trust me enough to show it to me. But they had talked a lot about how they wanted to be inspired by our voices and create the characters and the feeling of the film, in part at least, from the inspiration of how we sounded and the character that came to their minds listening to us speak. So, I think a lot of it was done after the recording sessions.

The transference from actor to character is clear as day in the final film, as Lee explains:

When we were in the booth, they filmed us the whole time. It's funny watching the film because I feel like you can see certain facial expressions or hand gestures that feel very reminiscent of things that we do. So, I think they did pull inspiration from our faces and gestures.

McLean, the head of rapid prototyping, gave a little more insight into how the actors informed the characters. "It depends on each actor, but there's this amazing group of facial animators who are just so focused on getting the best facial performance that they can," he began.

Brian McLean: They have a lot of different things that they use to get the performance. They have drawings and some very technical expressions that are built by the character designer. They also have the facial recording of the actors recording their lines, and then they'll record what's called LAVs: live-action video. Sometimes there's a facial animator who will set an iPhone up and act out a scene, or sometimes it's the stage animator who's acting out a scene.

By knitting all of those inspirational elements together, they then sit down and build out their facial animation on the computer.

Neither Lee nor Tremblay are done with the world of Wildwood in their minds, though the studio has yet to produce a sequel for any of their projects. "It would have to be later, that's the thing, if we were to do it," Tremblay acknowledged. "Hopefully that's part of the script, that 10 years have passed." Lee agreed wholeheartedly, adding, "I think it would be amazing. I think the world that is built is so vast that there's so much more to explore."

Cast

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  Peyton Elizabeth Lee

  Prue McKeel (voice)

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  Jacob Tremblay

  Curtis Mehlberg (voice)

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  Carey Mulligan

  Alexandra (voice)

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  Brenden (voice)