Photos from Laika
LOS ANGELES – It took 16 years for director Travis Knight to make “Wildwood,” a stop-motion animation masterpiece that’s Laika’s biggest and most ambitious film to date.
The ravishingly beautiful and movingly told epic fantasy from the Portland, Oregon-based studio was wildly cheered by the audience when it was recently screened as the closing night film of the ninth annual Animation Is Film Festival at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Travis Knight, who directed and produced “Wildwood,” Laika’s sixth stop-motion feature, came out on stage at the museum’s David Geffen Theater to applause after the movie’s last credits rolled for a conversation with Peter Debruge, Variety’s former chief film critic and now director of the SXSW Film & TV Festival.
Knight, who also directed “Kubo and the Two Strings,” another acclaimed Laika film, recounted how “Wildwood” began: “Colin Meloy is an extraordinary songwriter. He’s a Portlander. I heard he was writing a book. I was very curious. I got an early peek at the book he was writing.
“And this was in 2010, so we’d only made one film, ‘Coraline,’ at that point. I read the first 133 pages of this book that ultimately became more than a 500-page book.
‘Wildwood’ director and producer, Travis Knight, in conversation after the film’s screening at the Academy Museum. Photo by Ruben V. Nepales
From bestselling novel to stop-motion epic
“I fell in love with it instantly and I knew I wanted to make it. Then I had the daunting realization that I had no idea how we were possibly going to make it because it was so ambitious, so big, so sweeping that we were not prepared to make a movie of this scale.
“And so, we developed it over time, over 16 years. I finally felt like seven years ago, we were ready to make this movie.
“I got the team together and I said, okay, we’ve made five films at this point. We’ve built the tools, the technology, the tricks to make a film of this scale. Dudes, we are making ‘Wildwood’ and the universe smiled a knowing smile and said, fine, but first you must suffer beautifully. And we did in making this movie.”
The result is a sweeping, cinematic action fantasy epic of a scale never before attempted in stop-motion animation. Chris Butler adapted author Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis’ New York Times bestselling novel that starts when a murder of crows steals Prue McKeel’s (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) baby brother and flies off with him.
A scene from Travia Knight’s ‘Wildwood,’ a masterpiece epic from Laika’s stopmotion magicians. Photo from Laika
Prue, a determined, brave young girl, accompanied by Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay), her sweet, nerdy classmate, chases after the crows into the forests beyond Portland, which turns out to hide an ancient civilization dominated by the Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan).
From this tale, Knight and his team fashioned Laika’s sixth and arguably its best feature film. “Wildwood,” the studio’s first film in seven years, is worth the wait. It is a deeply moving tale of love, loss and grief.
Inspired by childhood stories
The filmmaker, 53, also the president and CEO of Laika, and the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, elaborated in the production notes about his fascination with “Wildwood’s” story:
“Long before there was a screenplay or a puppet or a camera, there were the stories my mother read to me. Tolkien. Lewis. Baum. Carroll. Stories that insisted the ordinary world was only ordinary because we hadn’t learned how to look at it properly.
“That somewhere just beyond the edge of the familiar, hidden behind the trees or around the next corner, wonder was patiently waiting.
“And then I realized the story unfolded in Portland, Oregon. My hometown. Which is a little like discovering ‘The Lord of the Rings’ only to learn Rivendell is just off Burnside Street, the Balrog occasionally plays indie folk festivals, and Aragorn insists on brewing his own ethically sourced single-origin coffee.”
Impressively shot by six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, in his first time to lens a stop-motion feature, “Wildwood” is, of course, anchored by Laika’s cadre of gifted artists.
Star-studded voice cast
The voice cast is top-rate. In addition to Lee, Tremblay and Mulligan, the other actors who bring the motley of characters to life include Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Jemaine Clement, Tom Waits, Tantoo Cardinal and Richard E. Grant.
“Wildwood” boosts Asian American representation with the lead, Prue, voiced by Lee, Erskine (Mrs. McKeel, Prue’s mother) and Awkwafina.
The baby brother, Mac McKeel, is unwittingly voiced by Arthur Knight, the filmmaker’s youngest of three children with his wife, Donna. The director shared an amusing anecdote in the conversation about how he found his baby voice actor:
“We were casting this movie and I had one piece of casting that I could not figure out, which was the baby in the movie. I was like, how the hell am I going to direct a baby? To be joyful, babble, cry hysterically?
“And then I realized, oh, I have a baby in my very house. So for four months, I chased my one-year-old baby around. He’s six years old now, by the way. That gives you a sense of how long it took us to make this fucking movie.
“I chased him around for four months, as he was making every possible noise there was. One thing about him was, in that moment where you hear this baby and he’s screaming for his life…(it was because) my son hated having his diaper changed.
“When my wife was changing his diaper, I recorded him with my iPhone as he was screaming. That’s what you’re hearing on screen.”
The art of stop-motion animation
A stop-motion animation artist with a puppet of ‘Wildwood’ lead character, Prue. Photo from Laika
All that astonishing stop-motion animation is made inside an unlikely place – an unprepossessing warehouse complex in a drab industrial office park area just outside Portland, which we visited again last August, this time for “Wildwood.”
Inside, in the small lobby and hallways, it still looks like any warehouse office but once you go deeper, you pass stages hidden by massive floor-to-ceiling black curtains. The production notes tout that more than 10,570 linear feet of curtain, equivalent to over two miles, were installed throughout the studio’s stages (112 were used for “Wildwood”).
The production notes offer some more remarkable statistics:
More than 1,000 artists, craftspeople, technicians and filmmakers contributed to “Wildwood’s” dazzling artistry. From those talents, 49 animators brought Prue, Curtis and the other characters and creatures to life, frame by frame.
The film set a Guinness World Record – it 3D-printed 142,000 face models. Although Laika did not invent 3D printing, it became the first major film studio to adapt and pioneer the technology to create puppets.
Other remarkable figures include 233 handmade puppets, 728 handcrafted trees, 1,155 production days,146 cameras photographed the film and 3,000 feathers used to create The General.
Past the immense curtains is where the stop-motion magic and beauty begin. Instead of solely tapping digital CGI, the stop-motion animation powerhouse built intricate miniature sets. No detail was too small on each of these Lilliputian sets.
You peer into a flickering lampshade inside one of these miniature homes and there’s a bulb inside. There are mushrooms sprouting at the base of a decaying tree.
Inside a miniature replica of Voodoo Doughnut, a Portland pride in real life, there are tiny dollar bills at the counter. On a sidewalk, a discarded white plastic fork lies near a tree.
The detail on a movie house named Knight Theatre, with the marquee heralding a double bill of “The First Witch” and “Future of Earth,” is impressive.
A cannon that fell in the aftermath of a battle scene lies in a ravine. I found this battle sequence spectacular when I recently watched “Wildwood.”
There are even visible tire marks on a muddy road in North Wood village.
Bringing the characters to life
After the fascinating guided tour of the sets, I sat down for two quick chats, first with Brad Schiff, head of animation, Deborah Cook, costume designer and Nelson Lowry, production designer. My second conversation was with Oliver Jones, head of character and practical effects, and Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping.
On the special challenges of designing and creating the costumes for “Wildwood,” especially for the two lead characters, Cook answered, “For Prue and Curtis, they’re contemporary characters in Portland. So it was really about capturing the flavor of contemporary Portland, a lot of people watching and making sure that they were relatable in some way, like their clothing really spoke to them as characters.
“And it’s always more difficult to do contemporary characters because they’re in our everyday clothing. We don’t want them to stand out too much but we still need them to be iconic because they’re our lead characters.
“You need to be able to see them in every scene, whoever they’re with, understand who they are, their history and where they’re from. So they don’t kind of look like they’re suddenly from a different world or a different part of the movie and fit with different characters. Kind of treading that fine line of nuance with them – that was quite a challenge.”
Lowry, an Annie Awards winner for best production design for “Kubo and the Two Strings,” talked about why he thinks Prue and Curtis will appeal to the global audience. “Their development through the film, their storytelling, how they develop and the challenges they face through the film help define them.
“And they start off being very certain kind of characters and end up being very different through thick and thin. Just their journey is notable and very emotional.”
Schiff, an Oscar nominee for Best Visual Effects for “Kubo and the Two Strings,” added, “They’re wonderful complements to one another. They’re two very different characters who have very different story arcs that run in tandem to one another.
“And I think both of them did one – growth. They both grow up but in very different ways. One’s a little stronger, one’s a little tragic. But they’re both very powerful.”
Laika’s ‘biggest and most ambitious’ film
A peek at an impressively detailed miniature set at Laika Studios in Portland, Oregon. Photo from Laika
“There are many metrics that make ‘Wildwood’ the biggest and most ambitious,” McLean replied when I asked why their latest film is Laika’s grandest project so far. “First, the story itself is grandiose and its locations. Then you have the cast and the crew that we had to build and design all sorts of different creatures and humans.
“Biggest puppets we’ve ever made, most number of puppets, most number of faces we’ve ever had to create for stop-motion production. So on every scale, every metric, ‘Wildwood’ is a huge project.”
McLean spoke about the single biggest invention in technology that has made the most impact in stop-motion animation: “Travis, at one point, described it as a generational improvement in what has been done in stop-motion animation. And it’s the crazy thing. It’s not the machine itself that is making this advancement. It’s the artists, craftsmen and the raw creative talent behind these machines that have made this so possible.”
Jones remarked that even though “Wildwood” is Laika’s love letter to Portland, it will also appeal to audiences all over the world. “It’s a very universal story,” he said. “The arc that Prue goes through and how far you would go for the ones that you love is something that we can all identify with.
“And Wildwood-Forest Park is a real park that in Portland is really a kind of metaphor for any woods or forests. And anybody’s imagination can go there. So anybody that’s grown up near a forest can really supplant their own imagination and project what that could be.”
The power of storytelling
As the conversation at the Geffen Theater wound down, Knight said, “We do not make these things to sit on a shelf like a Fabergé egg. We make these things to connect with other people.
“And I will say, as someone who has devoted his life to doing this sort of thing, there’s nothing more meaningful to me than someone coming up to me and saying, ‘I saw your movie. It made me feel seen. It made me feel like I was seeing myself reflected. It made me feel like I was not alone.’ And that’s why we make these movies.
“I think back to my own childhood. I was a lonely kid. I was a weirdo. We didn’t have the clinical terms that we have now for what that was but back then it was just a fucking weirdo. And the things that made me feel connected were stories.
“There were books. There were movies that made me feel reflected. I saw myself on a screen in a way that was not like myself but I knew that there was what I was connecting with was another person. I didn’t know that at the time.
“I do know that now that we make these things to connect with other people. And so when someone says, ‘Something you did meant something to me,’ it made me feel less alone. It made me feel like I was not the only one who was afraid. I was not the only one who has felt scared. I was not the only one who was loved. I’m not the only one who has lost someone and still kept walking. That means more to me than anyone could ever imagine.”
Ruben V. Nepales is an LA-based journalist whose honors include nine first prizes from the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards and the Los Angeles Press Club’s Southern California Journalism Awards. He authored “Through a Writer’s Lens,” which won first prize in nonfiction at the 2020-2021 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. In 2004, he became the first Filipino voter of the Golden Globe Awards. He is a member of the Golden Globe Foundation, one of Hollywood’s biggest philanthropic organizations.
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