Travis Knight has finished postproduction on Wildwood, bringing Laika Studios' 16-year stop-motion marathon to the point where it can finally head for theaters on Oct. 23. The director and producer completed the film in London before traveling to Beverly Hills, closing the book on a project that has consumed a large slice of his career.
That is why Wildwood is drawing attention now: it is not just another release, but the studio's most expensive film yet, arriving after a production that stretched across 231 weeks. Knight, 53, said the movie has been part of his life for more than half his career, which is hard to miss when he talks about it. He has been running Laika for about 20 years, and the studio built its name on handcrafted features like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, the latter his directorial debut.
Wildwood adapts Colin Meloy's 2011 fantasy novel and follows Prue, a teen in Portland, Oregon, who ventures into an enchanted forest to rescue her abducted baby brother. The scale of the production helps explain the time it took: the world was built from 233 handmade puppets, hundreds of thousands of replacement faces, 132 practical sets and 728 miniature trees representing 10 species native to the Pacific Northwest. Even the climactic battle runs to more than 400 shots, the kind of sequence that makes stop-motion feel less like animation than a small army of artisans moving frame by frame.
But Knight is not pretending the work is finished just because the editing is done. He said the film occupied so much of his time, thoughts and emotions that finishing it left him wondering what to do with all of that empty space. He called it a life work and a grand experiment, yet he also knows the real test has not started. The question now is whether audiences will meet the film with the same patience that made it possible, because on Oct. 23, Wildwood stops being a private obsession and becomes a box-office verdict.
Laika has spent two decades proving it can do more with less, and Knight said the studio still puts more on screen than people expect for the money it spends. Wildwood is the clearest test of that claim yet. The long production is over. The release date is next.
