Here in Hollywood: In AI era, artists of ‘Wildwood’ went proudly handmade

For 16 years, Travis Knight carried an imaginary world around in his head. 

It followed him through the changing fortunes of his animation studio, through the shifting demands of filmmaking, and eventually through a global pandemic that forced an entire production to reconsider how it could function. Now, after seven years in production and a journey that began long before the first puppet was made, “Wildwood” is finished. For Knight, the director and producer behind LAIKA’s critically acclaimed stop-motion feature, completing the film has brought a feeling that is difficult to reconcile with the satisfaction of finally seeing a dream realized.A scene from ‘Wildwood.’ LAIKA Studios

“Wildwood,” adapted from Colin Meloy’s novel, centers on Prue McKeel, a young girl whose search for her kidnapped baby brother takes her into a mysterious wilderness beyond Portland, Oregon. She and her unlikely companion Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay) must bravely soldier on to tackle the dangerous rescue mission.

At a press junket in Los Angeles three days before the film’s U.S. release, I asked Knight how it felt when he saw the completed film for the first time. “I’m still kind of processing it,” he says with an impish smile. “We literally finished the movie three weeks ago, so it’s still pretty fresh. I have to say, it’s weird, because this is something that’s lived in my imagination for almost two decades. I’ve thought about it all the time. It’s always been in some part of my life in some form. To finally be on the other side of it, and to now have other people be able to experience this thing that I’ve loved for 16 years, it is very heartwarming for me. But I do feel a slight sense of loss, because this thing that’s been a part of me for so long is now going out into the world.” 

Stop-motion filmmaking is an unusually intimate enterprise, one in which the passage of time becomes physically embedded in the finished work. Characters are built by hand, costumes are constructed stitch by stitch, and performances emerge through the painstaking adjustment of puppets, frame by frame. A movie can occupy the lives of hundreds of artists for years. By the time audiences encounter the finished film, the world they are seeing has already become deeply personal to the people who made it. 

The setting is close to home for Knight and the production, yet the world the filmmakers have constructed reaches into the fantastical. Its landscapes and inhabitants suggest a place shaped by the natural environment, folklore, and the limitless possibilities of childhood imagination.

The film’s long gestation became even more complicated when production was preparing to begin in 2019. Just as the team was moving into pre-production, the pandemic happened.

“We had just begun prepping to make the movie, and then this weird thing kind of was in the news, and we didn’t quite know what this was,” Knight recalls. “I remember, in March 2020, just to be safe, I shut the studio down for two weeks, and I said, ‘Okay, guys, let’s all go home, and I’ll see you back in April, and we’ll restart the thing.’ Obviously, that’s not how the world worked out.”

The challenge was particularly acute for a studio devoted to an art form built around physical proximity and collective problem-solving. Stop-motion requires animators, fabricators, puppet makers, costume designers and technicians to work in close conversation with one another. A small adjustment to a puppet can have consequences for an animator’s performance, while a decision about materials can influence the character’s entire physical design. The work advances through constant exchange.

Costume designer Deb Cook shows journalists the costumes used in ‘Wildwood.’ LAIKA Studios

“One of the things that makes stop-motion unique is that everyone’s kind of working within the same space,” Knight says. “We’re all creating. We’re all over each other. We’re kind of constantly interacting with one another. And we couldn’t do that for the very first time. We were not able to be in the same place at the same time, and we had to completely rethink how we make movies. It was very challenging, but ultimately, this team is amazing, and we figured it out.”

The team surprisingly thrived while improvising certain aspects of their jobs for the first time.

“We were in a really strange place, because all of a sudden, we were at home,” animation supervisor Brad Schiff says. “We did a lot of testing, a lot of character development, pulling reference from different films, who Prue could be, who Curtis could be.” 

With the production dispersed, even the earliest animation experiments required inventive solutions. Schiff recalls working with Ollie Jones, head of character and practical effects, to create simple versions of a coyote and several birds. These generic figures could be used for animation tests at home, allowing the team to study the physicality of the animals before their final designs existed.

“I remember that being the first thing that we did,” Schiff says. “It was really kind of interesting and really informative for the rest of the project.”

For costume designer Deb Cook, the screenplay became a map into the emotional and physical lives of the characters. Working from home during lockdown, she began cataloguing the details that could give each figure a recognizable history: clothing references, family circumstances, environmental influences and small indications of personality. 

“I spent a lot of time going through the script and taking out all the details of the characters, if there was any costumes called out, or their environment, things about the family, little details about their personality and gesture, and just bringing together ideas that I felt really explored them as people and humans, and gave them some kind of history as well,” Cook says.

The film’s Pacific Northwest setting offered another source of inspiration. With outdoor walks among the few activities available during lockdown, Cook found herself spending more time in the surrounding forests, observing the textures and details of a landscape that would eventually become integral to the film’s visual identity. 

“The movie being set really locally, it was kind of ideal, and it was quite anchoring as well to have that to do,” she says. “I spent a lot of time in the forest more than I ever have, so I was able to take in a lot more details.”A scene from ‘Wildwood.’ LAIKA Studios

Costuming a contemporary story carries its own particular demands. Audiences have an immediate understanding of modern clothing, making the smallest decisions about a character’s wardrobe significant. Cook approached those choices as a form of storytelling, gradually revealing who the characters are through what they wear. 

Meanwhile, Jones and his fabrication team were confronting one of the production’s most formidable material challenges: fur and feathers. These surfaces would have to function as convincing physical elements on camera, moving naturally while maintaining the carefully controlled appearance required by stop-motion animation. The challenge called for experimentation across a range of unconventional materials.

“We asked them to brainstorm kind of no-wrong-answers, give us ideas about what fur and feathers could be in this movie,” Jones says. “And so everybody was at home, kind of creating little swatches out of plastics, out of furs. And then everyone would just be holding things up to camera, and then photographing them, and then sending them back and forth digitally.”

The process sounds almost playful, with fabricators presenting improvised samples through video calls, yet the underlying work was serious investigation. Every material had to be evaluated for its visual qualities, its behavior on camera and its practical usefulness in the construction of a puppet. The experiments eventually established a repertoire of possible solutions that could inform the character designs.

The actors, meanwhile, faced a different version of the same creative problem: building fully dimensional characters with a limited set of tools. For Jacob Tremblay and Peyton Elizabeth Lee, who voice Curtis and Prue, respectively, the experience required an understanding of performance that differed considerably from their work in live-action productions.

“I haven’t done any stop-motion, but I haven’t done much animation, either,” Lee says. “And so I think this film was a unique challenge because when you’re on a set, you have so much more to work with. You have sets and costumes, and other actors to work off of, and you have your body, and your face, and your gestures.”

The challenge became finding the right vocal texture for Prue, one that could accommodate the character’s changing emotional circumstances without drawing attention to the mechanics of the performance. Knight encouraged Lee to resist an exaggerated cartoon voice, allowing the character to emerge from the actor’s natural register.

“Prue’s voice really was largely inspired by my own voice,” Lee says. “She really was just me, but then finding the different elements of her character in different aspects of my voice.”

For Tremblay, the recording process captured a particularly fleeting moment in his own development. His voice was changing during the sessions, with occasional cracks becoming part of Curtis’s vocal personality. What might have been an obstacle in another production became an unexpected advantage, lending the character a natural quality that could never have been entirely replicated through deliberate performance choices. 

“I recorded this at a time in my life where my voice was changing a lot,” Tremblay says. “So, it was cracking and breaking here and there. Just the overall texture of the voice. It really worked for the character, so it kind of brought out something very natural.”

A scene from ‘Wildwood.’ LAIKA StudiosThe timing also presented a practical consideration. Stop-motion production unfolded over approximately five years, creating the possibility that additional voice recordings might have sounded noticeably different from the original sessions. Tremblay recognizes how fortunate it was to have completed his recordings in one stretch, given how much his voice has since changed. 

There was another unexpected benefit to working on “Wildwood.” Having grown up in the entertainment industry, Tremblay is accustomed to seeing the machinery behind a performance. The process of watching his own work can sometimes create a distance between himself and the character. With this film, however, he found himself absorbed in the story in a way he had rarely experienced before.

“Usually when you hear your own voice, you kind of cringe a little bit,” he says. “Something in your brain is telling you, ‘That’s wrong’. So, usually, when I watch my own films or look at animation projects that I voice for, it sounds weird. But I think this was the first time that I was really able to disconnect from that and really immerse in the story. That was really special.”

The film’s elaborate physical construction is designed to disappear into the experience of watching it. Schiff says he is especially proud of the animation team’s ability to create performances that feel consistent and natural across the film, allowing viewers to forget that they are watching puppets.

Deb Cook shares that sentiment, while remembering the particular vulnerability of seeing the finished film with an audience for the first time. After years of working on individual details, the opportunity to experience the entire production as a collective event was something altogether different.

“Watching it with an audience for the first time is so special,” she says. “You can always hear people breathe, and their responses to it is really incredible. I just sit there, slightly terrified, just taking it all in.”

Jones sees the finished film as a testament to the collaborative nature of the work. “There were so many challenges within the scope of this movie that it really took everybody coming together to kind of eke out these solutions. Whether it would be for muscles or for birds, for tiny little rats. And so there’s so many kind of great innovations that are happening in the studio, but it really takes collaboration at its core to solve them,” he says. 

That idea of collaboration extends beyond the production itself. Knight has long considered storytelling an essential part of human experience, a way of transferring something deeply personal between people who may have entirely different lives. His own childhood was filled with drawings and homemade comic books. Watching his children play with action figures, he recognizes the same instinct to create characters, invent situations, and work through feelings by giving them shape.Behind the scenes filming ‘Wildwood.’ LAIKA Studios

“Fundamentally, on some level, a story is one imagination moving from one mind to the next,” he says. “It’s one soul moving from one body to the next. You’re sharing a part of yourself. And stories change, they evolve. What someone brings to the other side of the story, to listening to the story or watching the story, is different than the person who created it. We all bring something of ourselves to it, and that is the kind of the beautiful thing. It’s kind of an invisible handshake.”

It is a particularly meaningful observation in a moment when the world can feel increasingly difficult to make sense of. The pandemic that interrupted “Wildwood’s“ production was one defining example of how quickly familiar structures can disappear. The years since have brought further uncertainty, leaving questions about the future, the possibility of progress, and the value of creative expression feeling especially immediate.

For Knight, storytelling offers a way to maintain a connection across those uncertainties. It allows people to imagine circumstances beyond their own experience and to recognize parts of themselves in lives they have never lived. A film begins as an intensely personal act, shaped by the experiences and sensibilities of its creators, then becomes open to interpretation through the people who experience it.

“I really do believe a film is forever incomplete,” Knight says. “It finds someone to experience it.”

There is something especially resonant about that understanding of art coming from a filmmaker working in stop-motion. In an era increasingly defined by digital production and automation, LAIKA’s process places human touch at the center of the cinematic experience.

“Wildwood” demonstrates what can happen when people devote years of their lives to making something together. As our conversation turns to the experience of watching a film made through such an intensely human process, we talked about how creating something so painstakingly handmade feels almost revolutionary these days.

For Knight, the prospect of releasing “Wildwood” carries the mixed emotions of someone saying goodbye to a companion who has occupied much of his life. The story itself, with its themes of holding on and letting go, has come to mirror the circumstances of its creator. After 16 years, the film must leave the private world of his imagination and find its place in the imaginations of others.

When I suggest that this is, in its own way, an act of letting go, Knight laughs in recognition.

“It is. Part of the movie is about holding on and letting go. And I can’t hold on anymore. I have to let go.”