Welcome to Wildwood, Laika’s latest whimsy

On the list of things that used to annoy me but now bother me much less, sitting near the top is the state of Laika, the stop-motion animation production company that has made films including Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Laika began life as Will Vinton Studios, which was, as Laika is, a stop-motion house. Nike founder Phil Knight invested in Will Vinton Studios in the 1990s and used his new influence to “encourage” the company to hire his son, Travis, as an intern. Fast forward to the 2000s, Will Vinton Studios is struggling and Phil Knight swoops in, buying a controlling interest. Travis Knight becomes an executive at the company, which is rebranded as Laika. Kubo and the Two Strings was Travis’s first feature directorial credit in 2016.

Now, however, the Knight family takeover of Will Vinton Studios/Laika bothers me less for two reasons: 1) Travis Knight has the goods, and I maintain that nepotism bothers people less when real talent is involved. He’s a talented animator and director, and he is dedicated to probably the single most frustrating style of filmmaking in existence.

And 2) Laika simply wouldn’t exist without the Knight family’s support. Stop-motion animation takes so long, the company has made six films in almost twenty years. Only three of those movies have been hits, and not like, huge hits, just nice stable mid-range hits. But the last one was The Boxtrolls in 2014, Laika is basically a passion project for Travis Knight, who despite jumping to live-action filmmaking, still plugs away on stop-motion films for Laika. We simply would not have the delightful, whimsical world of Laika animation without the Knights, so…fine. The billionaires are supporting a largely unprofitable art form for the sake of the art itself. It’s really the best-case billionaire scenario.

Travis Knight’s latest Laika project is Wildwood, an adaptation of the illustrated children’s fantasy novel written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis. The story centers on Prue, a girl who must venture into a magical forest with her schoolmate, Curtis, to rescue her baby brother from a murder crows. While I am generally not here for crow slander, Wildwood looks magical and wonderful. Check it out:

 “From the hands that crafted Coraline” as if I’m not still having nightmares about the Other Mother’s spidery needle legs.

Besides looking like goddamn magic, Wildwood has a stacked voice cast, including Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Tom Waits, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day, Jake Johnson, Jemaine Clement, Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Maya Erskine, Rob Delaney, Richard E. Grant, Blythe Danner, and Tantoo Cardinal. Laika operates much more quietly than Pixar, but they can pull Pixar-level vocal casts because of their incredible reputation for artistry and storytelling. The film is also lensed by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (father of Emily and Zoe), who also lensed The Black Stallion, one of the most visually acute children’s movies of all time.

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Speaking of artistry, Wildwood isn’t just marketing a trailer, they’ve also put out a featurette about the creation of the stop-motion puppets for the film. They never say the word “AI”, but the emphasis on handicraft and the timelapse sequences showing people meticulously adjusting the puppets isn’t an accident. The message is clear: we’re still making this stuff one frame at a time. Even with computers to help us out, we’re still building physical worlds and photographing them in painstaking detail. I wonder if this is the moment when Laika, the underdog animation studio kept on life support by the Knights, finally breaks big.