Wildwood took 16 years to make, with 173,000 frames bringing its fantasy world to life
LAIKA’s stop-motion fantasy Wildwood brings together more than 1,000 creatives, 130 sets and years of painstaking physical animation.
Wildwood, the latest stop-motion fantasy from LAIKA, is bringing an extraordinary amount of physical craftsmanship to the screen after a production journey spanning around 16 years.
Directed by Travis Knight, the film adapts Colin Meloy’s novel about Prue McKeel, a young girl whose baby brother is taken into the mysterious Wildwood. Her search leads her into an unfamiliar world filled with strange creatures, dangerous encounters and an adventure far beyond the boundaries of her home.
The scale of the production is striking. More than 1,000 creatives and artists worked on the film, creating more than 140,000 puppet masks and over 130 sets. The production also involved 2,775 shots and more than 173,000 individual frames.
Those figures help explain why stop-motion animation can take years to complete. Instead of generating movement entirely through computer animation, artists physically reposition puppets and objects between photographs. When the frames are played in sequence, those tiny changes create the illusion of movement.
LAIKA has built its reputation on this painstaking approach through films including Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link.
The studio’s latest production arrives at a time when generative AI is changing conversations about animation, visual effects and the future of creative work. Wildwood offers a contrasting example of a production in which the physical sets, puppet designs and performances are central to the filmmaking process.
That does not make digital tools irrelevant to the production, but it highlights the enormous contribution of the artists who design, build, light and animate a world one frame at a time.
The film received its London Film Festival premiere earlier in October. Special early screenings are scheduled in the United States on 19 October, ahead of its nationwide US theatrical release on 23 October.
A confirmed general UK theatrical release date was not established in the available official information, so British audiences should check local listings rather than assume the US date applies here.
Where to watch: Wildwood is heading to cinemas, with its US theatrical release scheduled for 23 October 2026. UK-wide release details require confirmation.
