LAIKA Studios’ Wildwood premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October 2026 with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and reaches screens on 23 October. It is being discussed as a possible Best Animated Feature nominee at the 2027 Oscars.
Director Travis Knight on the timeline: production began in 2021, development started about ten years before that.
“This movie took us 16 years to make.”
A tour of LAIKA’s studio and the work behind Wildwood.
Sixteen years is the story
LAIKA’s last film, Missing Link, shipped in 2019. Before that the studio was best known for its 2009 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. That is seven years between releases, on a film whose development predates the studio’s own best-known work reaching its current reputation.
Knight’s description of the process is the most quotable thing either of us will write about it. The animators repeat the meticulous business of building and animating little objects in front of the camera:
“over and over until either the film emerges or society collapses.”
That is funny and it is also an accurate description of the economics. Stop motion does not scale. You cannot add compute to it, you cannot render it overnight, and you cannot parallelise a shot beyond the number of animators who can physically reach the set. A feature is some tens of thousands of individually posed frames, and the only variable you control is how many years you spend.
Everything else about stop motion follows from that constraint, including why LAIKA is one of very few studios still doing it at feature scale.
The AI-proof argument, and what is actually true in it
Guillermo del Toro has praised stop motion as a rare AI-proof kind of art, and that framing has had a lot of circulation. It is worth being precise about what holds up.
What is true: the artefact is physical. A puppet exists, is lit, is photographed. There is no prompt that produces a maquette, an armature, a costume sewn at 1:6 scale, or a face replacement printed and painted. The labour is in the object, and the object has to be made by hands before a camera sees it.
What is more complicated: LAIKA itself is one of the heaviest users of digital fabrication in animation. The studio pioneered 3D-printed replacement faces at enormous scale — Coraline used thousands of printed face parts; later films used tens of thousands — and it uses digital compositing, rig removal and CG extensions throughout. Stop motion at this level has been a hybrid discipline for fifteen years.
So the honest version of the claim is narrower and still interesting: stop motion is AI-resistant not because it refuses technology but because its bottleneck is physical. Every efficiency the studio has adopted — printing faces instead of sculpting each one, removing rigs digitally instead of hiding them — buys more animation per year. None of them removes the frame-by-frame posing, because that is where the performance lives.
The thing that cannot be automated is not the craft in general. It is one animator deciding, 24 times per second of screen time, where a hand goes.
The film
A fantasy coming-of-age story written by Chris Butler, based on the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy — lead singer and songwriter of The Decemberists — illustrated by Carson Ellis, and the first of a series.
Seventh-grader Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and classmate Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay) go into an enchanted forest beyond Portland to rescue Prue’s little brother Mac (Arthur Knight) after crows abduct him, through a world of magical creatures, bandits and talking animals.
It is LAIKA’s first PG-13 film — a notable shift for a studio whose reputation rests on children’s films that were already, in Coraline’s case, considered frightening.