Travis Knight has finished postproduction on Wildwood for Laika Studios after 16 years of work, and the stop-motion film opens in theaters on Oct. 23. Knight said the project has taken so much of his time that he is now reckoning with the end of it.
"It’s been a part of my life for more than half my career," Knight said in Beverly Hills about Wildwood. He added, "So I’m going through a little bit of a depression. It’s this thing that occupies so much of your time and your thoughts and your emotions — and when you’re done with it, it’s like, ‘What do I do with all this?’"
231 weeks in production
Wildwood took 231 weeks of production, a stretch that tracks with the 16-year development span Knight described. The film is adapted from Colin Meloy's 2011 fantasy novel by Chris Butler, with Peyton Elizabeth Lee playing Prue, a teen living in Portland, Oregon, who ventures into an enchanted forest to rescue her abducted baby brother.
The production scale is unusually physical even by stop-motion standards: the world was composed of 233 handmade puppets, hundreds of thousands of replacement faces, 132 practical sets, and 728 miniature trees representing 10 species specific to the Pacific Northwest. The climactic battle sequence alone features more than 400 shots.
Laika's biggest spend
Knight said Wildwood is Laika's most expensive film yet, but he would not disclose the budget. He also said, "We do more with less, and we always have," and "We put more onscreen than you would think for the amount of dollars that we invest in these movies."
That mix of scale and restraint is the business story here: Laika has been running as an independent animation company for about 20 years, and Knight has been at the center of it for most of that run. Kubo and the Two Strings was his directorial debut, while Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings remain part of the studio's stop-motion identity.
Oct. 23 in theaters
Wildwood now moves from the production phase to release, with theaters set to get it on Oct. 23. Knight's challenge is straightforward from here: turn a 16-year labor and a 231-week build into a box-office result that justifies the scale Laika put on screen.
