You might hear the phrase “they don’t make them like they used to,” but there are few instances in which that is more true than with the animation studio LAIKA. LAIKA makes films that feel at once delightfully nostalgic and old-school, but also wholly innovative and pushing the medium forward in exciting new ways.
One of the most beautiful things about LAIKA’s films is their ability to capture the childlike feelings of imagination and wonder, and that seems to be more the case than ever with Wildwood.
Wildwood Writer Chris Butler Talks About the Role of Imagination in the Film
This is what Wildwood writer Chris Butler had to say about the role that imagination played in bringing the film to life.
“[It’s] vital. I mean, it’s always been part of it for me. That’s my lifeblood,” said Butler. “I think, in particular, with Wildwood, it’s one of those movies that we think we’ve heard this story before of a child crossing a magical threshold into a fantastical world. And I think for me, when I first heard about the project from Travis, it was like, ‘Well, what’s LAIKA’s version of that?’”
“Because we know Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Narnia, and we’ve even done it with Coraline. What can we do with Wildwood that is embracing these fantasy tropes and playing with that imagination, but doing it in a daring way? Doing it in a more subversive way and really bringing something to the screen that we haven’t done before.”
Wildwood stars Jacob Tremblay and Peyton Elizabeth Lee Talk about Finding the Humanity in Fantasy
But while Wildwood is a film rich in fantasy and imagination, it is also a deeply poignant, human story. The film is rooted in the story of Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teenage girl whose baby brother is kidnapped by a murder of crows, sending her on a journey into an unknown realm to rescue him.
She is joined by her friend Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), who is even more in over his head. For the actors, the heart of the story is not the action, but instead the characters.
“Yeah, I think that’s one thing that I noticed right away about Travis — that he wanted our characters to feel very real,” said Tremblay. “This is a super magical, fantastical film, but the performances and the characters are all pretty grounded, which I thought creates a really good contrast. So we were right off the bat playing it pretty real, and the emotion comes out very raw.”
Thankfully, the script is incredibly rich, which gave the actors plenty to work with.
“The script was very descriptive,” said Lee. “So a lot of the stage directions and the sets and the characters and how they’re acting was on the page, but beyond that, it was a lot of trust in the creative team and our own imaginations.”
“And it’s different when you’re voice acting and you have to really focus on the tone of your voice because nothing will come out in your facial expressions,” Tremblay adds. “Although they did record us to kind of have an idea of maybe what our faces could be doing.”
As is the case with many animated films, particularly stop-motion films, Wildwood had a long production process. The much-anticipated film is finally coming out in October 2026, but Tremblay and Lee recorded their lines five years ago. In that time, they, like their characters, have experienced tremendous growth and change themselves. We asked them what it felt like to now be looking back at the process they completed so long ago.
“It was interesting because I had done so much voice work before this too, for Luca, but this was very different,” Tremblay explains. “I mean, looking at the scene from a bunch of different angles, you can do that for live-action a lot, but in animation, it’s very different. It’s hard to imagine something off of a page when you’re not there on a set and you’re not there in a wardrobe, so that was cool as well — just a good exercise to see what this can look like.”
“I think the length of the process was a big learning experience,” said Lee. “In live-action stuff, you’re used to a much quicker turnaround. Even the most lengthy processes are still much shorter than this, so I think there’s something kind of special about the excitement of working on a new project and then sort of having to let it sit and marinate in the background, then it sort of all coming back and now us getting to do press for it and talk about it and watch it enter the world. I think sort of relaxing the timing of things was kind of a lesson for me that this movie taught me.”
Wildwood opens in theaters on October 23.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
