by Rollin Bishop

I struggle to remember my first brush with stop-motion animation. The Gumby Show syndicated bits? Rankin/Bass specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? It definitely wasn't Ray Harryhausen's work on Jason and the Argonauts, but it's mixed in there somewhere as I saw the film far too young and faint memories of giant bronze statues and skeleton warriors linger.

Whatever the case might be, I know I was enchanted immediately. It wasn't for some time that I actually understood the blood, sweat, and tears that went into producing stop-motion animation of any kind, but seeing it in motion makes a kind of inherent understanding: this is something altogether different.

I've grown older, but I've not grown out of this attitude. Stop-motion animation remains something altogether different; it's magical. Animation is, by its very nature, essentially turning a series of still images into moving images, right? One after another after another. Stop-motion animation takes that a step further with a real tangibility, a physicality, that other forms of animation lack. Rather than every frame a painting, every frame a thousand miniatures.

All of this is just a preamble to a fairly obvious statement: I am very excited for Wildwood, the new stop-motion animation film from Laika. Set to release on October 23, 2026, Wildwood is an adaptation of the book of the same name by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis. It's also the first feature from Laika in seven years, with the last being 2019's Missing Link — a dud at the box office, though it was reviewed fairly well by critics and deserved better in this specific critic's opinion.

Laika has been largely quiet about Wildwood until recently, and the first real teaser trailer only just released. The studio describes the movie as "a sweeping, darkly magical adventure about a young girl who ventures into a dangerous hidden forest to rescue her brother – an odyssey shaped by love, power, and the courage to confront the unknown." The teaser is set to "My Tears Are Becoming A Sea" by M83, and, well, it certainly seems to promise that.

There's plenty to be said about the… unusualness of Laika. There's a long history that might not be evident at first blush given Laika itself basically doorstops its own existence as beginning in 2005. Which is, you know, technically true in the sense that 2005 is when Laika as a company formed out of the ashes of Will Vinton Studios. It's a long story, but Wildwood director and Laika CEO Travis Knight is the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, who also owns the studio. The 2021 documentary Claydream does a good job of going over Vinton's history, if you're curious.

But sticking with the present and the future, whatever you think of Laika's origins there's no mistaking that there's a deep-seated love for stop-motion animation at work. Laika's website and YouTube channel are both treasure troves of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews dissecting how shots were made and all the work that's gone into any brief scene. I've watched the ones about Kubo and the Two Strings over and over, and always marvel at both how small and how big the models of the beasts are — and what it takes to capture them "moving" as fluidly as Laika does.

Maybe Wildwood is good, maybe it's bad, though I find myself less and less interested in that false dichotomy. I couldn't possibly say one way or another quite yet, though I do look forward to finding out for myself. What is clear is that a lot of hard work went into it. Those Douglas firs in the Wildwood teaser trailer and stills? Somebody made all of those, and largely out of chicken wire and tissue paper, apparently.

"The finer details of the foliage required sculpting fine-gauge sparkle mesh into branch shapes," shared Jess Jennings, who works with Laika generally as a landscape model maker and more specifically apparently on Wildwood, on social media. Even more specifically, Jennings apparently made a bunch of those background trees. "During production, I accidentally used all the fine sparkle mesh… on earth."

Any artistic endeavor where you can accidentally use up the entirety of a crafting material available on the planet seems worthwhile to me, and I look forward to seeing how Laika put all of that to use in October when Wildwood actually releases.