LAIKA Studios is known as one of the premier animation studios in the world, having been behind such beloved films as Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings. The studio’s latest film, Wildwood, is a massive fantasy coming-of-age film, adapted from the acclaimed novel by Colin Meloy.
Some of the oft-unsung heroes of LAIKA’s films are the studio heads, like production designer Nelson Lowry, costume designer Deborah Cook, animation supervisor Brad Schiff, and director of rapid prototyping Brian McLean. You might not know their names, but if you love LAIKA’s films, you certainly know their work.
We at FandomWire got the opportunity to speak with these talented artists and their work on Wildwood while touring the set of the animated fantasy epic.
Wildwood Artisans Discuss Bringing the Stop-Motion Fantasy Epic to Life
Wildwood is a film that is (literally) close to home for the LAIKA team, being that it is set in and around Portland, Oregon, where the studio’s headquarters are located. In this way, they are blending together the familiar (if sometimes wacky) real-world location of Portland with the fantasy world of talking animals we see in the film.
But for these artisans, the approach was not to create something exaggeratedly fantastical; it was to build something that felt true to life despite the fantasy.
“I wanted to downplay, at least in the environments, the fantasy elements because I think that just the act of building Forest Park in stop frame and building it in miniature — just the fact that we’re building this giant, beautiful environment by hand makes it a fantasy environment in some way,” explains Lowry. “And then having it be so beautifully lit by Caleb. And there was part of me that wanted to resist. Beforehand, I watched every fantasy movie, and there was a shtick to those that I didn’t want to try to reproduce because, honestly, it’s all been done.”
“So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just make it very naturalistic, but I’ll just up the beauty of it wherever possible.’ And I thought, ‘I’ll let the storytelling and the fact that there’re animals and wars and living ivy do the talking for the fantasy aspect of it.’ And after having time away and seeing it, I’m glad I did that. I feel like it keeps the film a little bit more grounded, and there’s so much about the interpersonal story of the characters and Prue’s arc that is fantasy enough. So that’s kind of where I left it.”
“Yeah, and from a performance point-of-view, it’s all naturalistic,” Schiff says. “But you know, the biggest challenge is in the fantasy world. You’ve got anthropomorphic animals walking around and wearing clothes and whatnot, and I think the coolest thing — and a lot of it was in the story — was to play with Prue and Curtis’s wonder of seeing these things for the first time. And then how they play off these anthropomorphic animals as opposed to people and how they kind of become accustomed to it and it just becomes normal for them in not a very long time. But the biggest challenge was just the animals that were supposed to be walking around human-esque.”
“And there’s also a conceit in the film — a suspension of disbelief that Portland, a modern city with technology, planes, and yet there’s a forest that nobody can enter unless they have a magic spell,” Lowry adds. “So that alone is fantasy. You just have to believe that nobody’s tried to get in there or flown a drone.”
In more ways than one, Wildwood is inarguably LAIKA’s most ambitious project yet. The production team emphasized how each LAIKA project builds on the last one — techniques that they learned for Missing Link and Kubo and the Two Strings were improved and built upon for Wildwood, besides new techniques invented specifically for this film.
Although there were many awe-inspiring things that the LAIKA team showcased, the one that stuck out the most was a battleground set, of which tour visitors saw only 1/20th of the final set. The climax of the film, which will take place on this set, was described as a “Lord of the Rings-style battle sequence.” If the scale is any indication, that statement is no exaggeration.
One of the most impressive accomplishments of the film is that it will have a runtime of two hours and twelve minutes, giving it the record of being the longest stop-motion animated film ever made. But for the team, they chose to look at the film as a challenge in a different way.“There were so many challenges from this original script, from just sheer number of puppets, sheer design challenges, number of animals, that the length of the movie wasn’t the first thing,” explains McLean. “If we were going to solve this at all, it’s small, digestible little chunks. We’re going to just work on this and solve this problem and that problem. So the length didn’t scare me nearly as much as some of the designs did.”
For a while, LAIKA was one of the few studios still making hand-crafted animated features like Wildwood. In fact, the studio is known for its innovative blend of stop-motion and computer-generated techniques. However, we are now seeing more and more people follow in their footsteps and return to this hand-crafted approach. We asked the artisans behind Wildwood why they think people are starting to gravitate back towards this style.
“Because it looks great,” Cook puts it firmly and succinctly
“Because it looks great,” McLean agrees. “You know, when we all were kids coming out of a movie, whether it was Star Wars or ET, whatever it was, there was always this unbelievable ‘Aha!’ moment of ‘How the heck did the movie makers pull that off?’ That magic trick you just saw, the movie magic that probably made us all fall in love with film.”
“And for a good 20 years, it happened to my kids — they’d come out of a Marvel movie and I’d be like, ‘Hey guys, what did you think?’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, that was cool. It was all just done in CG.’ And I was like, ‘No, don’t you get a bunch of artists and technicians and software developers made that software?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, but that was easy.’”
“But when they still come out of these movies, as the trend has gone to be more practical — Project Hail Mary, they were so psyched that the robot was a puppeteer. And it’s like, ‘Oh my God, that wasn’t a CG model!’ To me, it brings back that movie magic moment that we all had as kids, that we then just sit there and try to figure out the magic trick.”
“So this is relatable as well,” Cook adds. “When you see things that are built out of things that are familiar to you, and aren’t constructed in a computer where you just don’t know what that is and it looks a little soupy, and the skin and the fabrics look like they’re made from the same material. When you see that difference in stock frame, and it’s something that is familiar but it’s been reconfigured in a different way — I think it’s way more relatable for us as humans to warm to it in a way.”
Wildwood opens in theaters on October 23.
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