LAIKA movies are something special. The Oregon-based studio has been making some of the best stop-motion movies since 2009’s Coraline. Now, their first movie in almost ten years, Wildwood, is among the 2026 movies you can check out in theaters. When CinemaBlend sat down with the cast and Wildwood director and LAIKA CEO Travis Knight, we got to discuss the well… wild amount of work it took to make the movie. Let’s get into it.
The ‘Impossible’ Challenge Of Wildwood
Wildwood is the studio’s longest movie to date, with a runtime of 2 hours and 11 minutes, and every frame is handcrafted by tons of creators. One incredible fact that I learned out of the gate is that 142,030 tiny faces were created to act as the various facial expressions the characters wear during the fantasy adventure. Check out this video to see a bit of the process yourself:
Pretty amazing, right? It’s like how classic 2D animation draws every frame, except in stop motion, every character, scene and expression is physically created in a real environment. When we asked Knight about what challenges the movie presented him with, he said this:
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I knew right from the outset that this was gonna be almost impossible to try to figure out how we can make this movie. It’s so complex. It’s so big and sweeping and epic in its ambition and scale. It’s got so many different characters, so many different locations, so many different action sequences, including the battle sequence that happens at the end of the film, which is this 12-minute extravaganza of well over 400 shots and all these crazy things happening. That was challenging. I think people generally can understand that that kind of thing to do in stop motion is difficult.
Wildwood is a book-to-screen adaptation that Travis Knight and LAIKA have been working on for 16 years. It’s a passion project that wasn’t by any means easy, but very rewarding. Here’s one unexpected snag about making the film that is less obvious than the movie’s pure scale, per Knight:
I think the thing that people maybe don’t understand is that it’s the quiet, simple, subtle moments where characters are barely doing anything and they’re just having a conversation where they’re opening up to someone. Those things are just as hard, if not more so, and just as important, if not more so, than the spectacle, because that’s when these characters fully come alive.
Wildwood follows a 13-year-old girl named Prue who goes on a daring quest to save her baby brother when he is mysteriously kidnapped by a flock of birds in Portland’s woodland forest. There, she comes across talking animals, opposing armies and the dangerous dowager governess who’s consumed by immense grief.
Did The Cast Get To Take Anything Home?
When we got to chat with the actors who lent their voice talents to the characters, I was curious if they got to take home any of the 142,030 tiny faces that gave their characters life. Here’s what they had to say:
Jake Johnson: “I would love to be able to take some of their artwork home. I would love to have any prop from the movie. Every job I have, I like to take something home, but this one, we were so far from the artwork that they did, but it would be so cool to have.”
Awkwafina: “It’s probably for the best that they didn’t let us near the art part. ‘Oh, can I move that?’ ‘Can I hold them?’ We were in the booth.”
Jacob Tremblay: “If I ever make it back to the studio, though, I’ll try and steal one… I’ll take one of each, probably. One of every character.”
Surprising, right? The actors didn’t get to experience the handmade work that’s pivotal to Wildwood. But the movie wouldn’t have come alive without their time in the booth. Johnson plays Prue’s dad, Tremblay plays Prue’s friend Curtis, and Awkwafina plays a magical rat named Septima.
While the artists, technicians and filmmakers seem to be the only ones to actually touch these real-life characters, we can see the fruits of their labor in theaters now.
