Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot , worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic , and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks . Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood , the latest release from Coraline studio Laika . While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies. “When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing,” Deschanel says. “It was much more complicated than I expected.”
📌 The Core Development
Wildwood has been a long time coming. Laika CEO Travis Knight originally optioned the rights for the book of the same name, written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, in 2011. But production didn’t begin until a decade later. “I’ve been working on it in some form or another for 16 years,” Knight, who also directed Wildwood , says. “The reason why I stuck with it, the reason why I had to make this movie no matter what, is because of what it meant to me personally. Underneath it all, it’s a story about love and loss and grief, it’s about the impossible things that love asks of us, and that meant something to me personally in a very profound way.”
It’s also the biggest production Laika has ever undertaken. Wildwood tells the story of a young girl named Prue who has to venture into the “impassable wilderness” that surrounds Portland in order to find her baby brother. When she enters the forest she discovers a fantasy realm reminiscent of Narnia, with magical spells, talking animals, and warring factions. It required nearly 50 animators and more than 200 puppets to pull it off, and the film is full of ambitious sequences, like a 12-minute battle with dozens of soldiers and a chase scene through a bustling Portland, where Prue’s brother is carried away by a gigantic murder of crows.
🔍 Background & Sector Context
According to head of animation Brad Schiff, the studio’s ethos involves mixing “old-school craft with modern technology.” With each project, he says, Laika develops new techniques. If something works well, they then push the idea even further on the next project. For instance, on Laika’s previous film, Missing Link , the main character was outfitted with a diaphragm so that when an animator turned a screw on the puppet’s back, the diaphragm could expand or contract, creating the illusion that it was breathing. This has since become the standard for puppets in Laika’s films.
These may sound like small details, but over the years they add up. For costume designer Deb Cook, there wasn’t a single innovation on Wildwood that stood out to her, but rather the sheer number of tools she had at her disposal. “Over time we’ve gathered together a library of techniques that we’ve been able to put into practice on this movie,” she says. This was especially important on Wildwood , which features a huge range of costumes; in the city sequences everyone is dressed in modern clothing, whereas in the forest characters have more fantastical looks.
📊 Industry & Real-World Impact
For Wildwood , many of the advancements came down to materials. The costumes made use of more flexible fabrics, for example, and the team also engineered a new process for creating silicone that’s lighter and more durable than what they previously used. “We’ve done this so we can wean ourselves off of foam latex, which is stinky and it shrinks over time, and five years later it kind of just crumbles,” says Oliver Jones, head of characters and practical effects. “There are advantages to rethinking a lot of these materials that were our go-to probably since King Kong .”
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🔮 Strategic Outlook & What Lies Ahead
The scale of Wildwood has also forced the studio to adopt another seemingly much more boring practice: being better organized. “They’ve been misplaced,” Cook says, when asked if she’s ever lost a puppet. “There’s now a very sophisticated tracking system because there are so many moving parts, and so many stages around the studio.”
And while much has been said about the large and elaborate sequences in the film — Knight says the epic battle scene is “probably the most technically challenging thing that we’ve ever done” — all of these techniques are designed to imbue more humanity into characters that are portrayed by puppets. In that regard, small details like the flow of fabric or the impression of breathing are vitally important.
