Somewhere inside LAIKA Studios, hundreds of artists are hunched over miniature kitchens and hand-built forest scapes, each one placing a puppet’s face with the same precision a surgeon brings to a scalpel. Wildwood, arriving in theatres October 23, is the kind of film that makes you reconsider what a single human pair of hands is capable of. It is also, by any rational accounting, a completely impractical way to make a movie, and that is exactly the point.
Building 117 worlds by hand, one shingle at a time
The scale of Wildwood is almost comically ambitious for a medium that runs on patience and tweezers. The production required 117 unique physical locations, from handcrafted street-level replicas of Portland, Oregon, to sprawling magical battlefields built at miniature scale. Every crack in the pavement, every shingle on every roof, every leaf on every tree was fabricated from scratch. Designers worked to make those tiny environments read as genuinely enormous on a cinema screen, because the film was always intended, as the team put it, ‘to be experienced in a room where the world envelops you.’
The goal is a precise balancing act. Audiences should never feel like they are peering into a dollhouse, but they should feel the tactile, handmade quality underneath everything. When those two sensations arrive together, the magic holds.
Translucent tears and a jetpack with two tiny turnbuckles
The puppet work on Wildwood pushes into territory stop motion has not reached before. Animators, who are functioning as physical actors one frame at a time, now work with internal rigs the team calls jetpacks: two small turnbuckles fitted inside the puppet’s back that tilt the character forward or backward depending on which direction they are turned. Tiny breathing mechanisms built into the skeletons give puppets the illusion of inhaling and exhaling.
For the first time on a LAIKA production, animated muscles were built inside the puppets themselves. On the surface, 3D-printed replacement faces carry the emotional weight of the performances. The printer can produce naturalistic, realistic expressions at a resolution precise enough to render translucent tears that well up on a character’s face and animate downward along the cheek.
The face count is staggering. On Coraline, when LAIKA first developed the replacement-face technique, the studio produced roughly 20,000 faces. On Wildwood, that number climbed past 142,000.
Custom fabric woven specifically for the production handles costume movement at puppet scale without behaving like fabric on a small object. The material folds and shifts the way a full-size garment would, so the visual logic of the world stays intact.
As one of the filmmakers said plainly: ‘Stop motion is the worst way there is to make a movie. It’s not easy. It’s not fast. It’s not a guaranteed success. It’s almost impossible. It is a ridiculous way to make a movie, but I think it’s never been more poignant than it is today.’
A single replacement face, ready for its one moment
Somewhere in that count of 142,000 printed faces is one made for a single expression on a single character in a single frame, built by a person who will never appear in the credits of the shot it exists for.
Wildwood opens in theatres October 23. Every leaf in it was placed there by a human being who thought about where it should go.
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