In the heart of Hillsboro, Oregon, the artists at LAIKA Studios are conjuring genuine movie magic to create their most ambitious feature to date: an adaptation of Colin Meloy’s dark fantasy novel Wildwood. The story follows two young Portlanders as they venture into a fabled and forbidden forest in search of a child stolen by a mad queen, facing their fears in a world that will eat you alive if you’re not careful.
At the height of this past summer, I made my third trip to LAIKA for a behind-the-scenes look at the studio’s latest masterpiece, and what I saw was some of the most dedicated people in show business making hand-stitched miracles, awe-inspiring landscapes, and stop-motion wonders that will help transport audiences to another world.
During the tour, I visited various departments to learn more about this sprawling adventure that’s been in the works for roughly 16 years. As it was my third time there, I was amazed by how LAIKA continues to defy my expectations despite my familiarity with their creative methods. I want to share some key moments from the tour with you now. Let’s venture into Wildwood!
Deb Cook – Head of Costume at LAIKA
Deb’s job is to research costume designs that provide an infrastructure for anchoring the characters’ identities and personalities, and visualizing their emotional arcs.
Deb informed us that Carson Ellis’ illustrations in the original Wildwood novels served as a significant jumping-off point for the film’s costume designs. Instead of recreating the outfits as they appear on the page, Deb uses Ellis’ drawings as a blueprint to map the costumes’ core, then applies her own flavor to adapt them for different scenes and situations throughout the film. Every outfit is chosen with care, and not every article of clothing is situational; most are based on a character’s personality and vibes.
Unlike most LAIKA films, Wildwood features a massive cast of animals, with everything from coyotes to giant eagles taking up arms or residence in the forbidden forest, known as the Impassable Wilderness. Designing costumes for the coyote soldiers and others proved challenging for Deb (as well as LAIKA’s team of fabricators), as each outfit required different stress points to ensure the animals could move as they normally would without becoming encumbered by their clothes.
Continuing to discuss the challenges of designing costumes for Wildwood, Deb said the scope and scale of the project are unlike anything the studio has done before. There are so many puppets and sets involved, and scheduling is often a nightmare. Still, the artists at LAIKA are used to overcoming the impossible, and thanks to great interpersonal communication, the teams remain in sync. Every stitch must be accounted for, every fabric sourced, evaluated, organized, and tested. The characters need to be able to perform a wide array of motions if they’re to be believed as living, breathing participants in a weird and wonderful world that dazzles our imaginations.
Nelson Lowry – Production Designer at LAIKA
Moving from the wardrobe department to world-building, we met with Nelson, the head of the studio’s art department, who oversees the film’s overall look and feel.
Because Wildwood takes place in Portland, inspiration for LAIKA’s next film is literally right outside the studio’s front door. The film takes great care to reconstruct iconic locales, monuments, and businesses associated with the city, with particular attention paid to the St. John’s area. Throughout the film, audiences will surely catch a glimpse of places such as the St. John’s Bridge, Voodoo Donuts, and the famous Twin Cinemas. There are even nods to other films in LAIKA’s history, including the Adelina Hotel from 2019’s Missing Link. There’s also a camera shop in town called Caleb’s Cameras, a nod to Caleb Deschanel, who served as the Director of Photography on Wildwood.
Every aspect of what you see in Wildwood‘s sets is hand-made. You can’t buy any of the props in stores because everything is highly stylized and tailor-made to complete the film’s unique look. Many of the sets are built atop platforms that often separate and roll away, giving the artists at LAIKA unrestricted access to the film’s elaborate environments. Every element of a set is painstakingly crafted to the smallest detail, with dynamic lighting and cinematography highlighting the intentional blemishes that add realism to every surface.
While visiting several sets, we got up close and personal with 86 Rue Thurmond, the massive 14-foot residence of Owl Rex within the Avian Principality of the Impassable Wilderness. There are three sections of Rue Thurmond, each with its own soundstage for filming. All the rooms are as ornately decorated as the exterior, with lush, red leather furniture, crowded, crooked bookcases, and balconies for stargazing.
During the presentation, Nelson noted that LAIKA uses special LED lights that last for thousands of hours to light their sets. In the past, LAIKA could not leave sets under extreme lighting for long, lest they begin to melt precious objects and characters strategically placed around the stage. Design for the production began during the COVID-19 pandemic, with designs being finalized early to avoid reconstruction down the road.
Last but certainly not least, Nelson said that Portland’s Forest Park was a significant source of inspiration for Wildwood, with whole sections of the woodlands modeled after unique locations in the 52,000-acre space. Nelson lives near the park and would walk through it every morning, taking reference photos and sketching its natural scenery. One of the goals while designing Wildwood was not to make it too fantastical. Nelson took thousands of photographs inside Forest Park to help achieve the film’s natural look. Instead of wowing audiences with floating islands, reverse waterfalls, and levitating trees, Wildwood is slightly more grounded, yet it still feels like another world entirely.
Ollie Jones – Head of Character and Practical FX at LAIKA
Next, Ollie’s portion of the tour offered an in-depth look at the puppets’ armatures, including all the bits and pieces that make them so expressive and alive. LAIKA’s tech has evolved by leaps and bounds since 2009’s Coraline, and getting a close-up look at the inner workings of Wildwood was a highlight of the day.
While gazing at various puppets, we saw devices like the Jetpack, a tool that manipulates characters in tiny increments, invisible to a camera’s frame grabbers. The Jetpack helps achieve more lifelike performance from each puppet. Likewise, Ollie showed us a key that, when turned, simulates breathing using an internal mechanism called Breathers. You can literally see a character’s chest expand and contract when you twist the key. It’s like holding a living doll in your hands.
Another mesmerizing piece of tech was the puppet’s hands. I got to hold and play with a character’s arm, shifting the wrist and positioning the fingers in various poses. It was giving metal horns when I put it back on the table. Each hand contains a complex skeleton beneath the skin that can be manipulated with a pair of tweezers. Because pieces like the arm (and hand) are so delicate, LAIKA prints thousands, knowing they’re fragile and are often the first thing to go on an active puppet. The way the thinly-cut steel pipes up the arm and spiders out near the palms is wicked.
Wildwood is the first of LAIKA’s films to feature birds prominently. In the film, Prue meets The General, a massive eagle that aids her mission to rescue her stolen baby brother. The General has thousands of hand-sewn animatable feathers. I got to bend and shape the General’s wings to my will, marveling at someone needing to animate every aspect of the beast for a single frame: no AI, no digital trickery. Nothing but a human touch moving every piece a fraction of an inch to capture the desired look on screen.
Brian McClean – Rapid Prototyping at LAIKA
Diving deeper into the character mechanics, we visited Brian McClean, who creates tens of thousands of interchangeable, hyper-detailed replacement face parts and facial expressions for the puppets.
Brian works in a department of 60 to 70 artists, with half working behind a computer to model puppet parts in 3D before sending them off to the printer. Since Coraline, LAIKA has used interchangeable faces to convey each character’s emotions. Every piece is numbered for quick referencing and cataloged according to the desired expression. The face plates pop on and off the puppet with tiny magnets that make a satisfying snap as they gravitate into place. Behind the faceplate is a clockwork of moving parts. Each part can be manipulated with an X-Acto knife or other tools, allowing the characters to blink, move their eyes, smile, and make other gestures. All the parts move independently and are extremely fragile.
When LAIKA prints an “Expression Kit,” it’s comprised of 24 faces, one for each frame in a second’s worth of film. Moreover, they never reuse faces. In the studio’s early days, the team printed phoneme kits, containing a series of mouth shapes for different words and sounds. However, no director wants to be told to use the same smile at the end of the movie as at the beginning. In a story like Wildwood, characters go on an emotional journey; they need to change as much as the parts that represent them.
As fragile as the parts that make up the puppet are, the characters themselves are quite durable. Each puppet is built to withstand extensive handling, with individual parts ready to be replaced so filming can continue.
Brad Schiff – Head of Animation at LAIKA
Bringing all these physical elements to life falls to Brad Schiff, who oversees the stop-motion animation process across the studio’s feature films.
A goal while making Wildwood was for the animators at LAIKA to take their skills to the next level while delivering naturalistic performances. There is so much emotion and heaviness in this film, and the animators want you to think it’s real. Similarly, the film requires LAIKA to animate more animals than ever before. To make the beasts believable, the crew studied real animal movements to inform their anthropomorphic design. The wolves look and move like the beasts from fairy tales, but there’s a familiar human-like quality to them, too.
Animating the birds was also a test of skill and patience. Birds are like shapeshifters; they elongate and squash. When dealing with the dense materials the puppets are made of, it’s sometimes challenging to achieve the desired look and sense of motion. The tips of the wings are made using laser-etched silk with bendable wires running through them. Each feather is attached to a silicone skin for better movement. Everything you see on these creatures is 3D printed to the letter.
My favorite part of this presentation was when Brad talked about how hair moves in Wildwood. I asked if they animate individual strands with each frame. As it turns out, animating hair is an illusion at LAIKA. Instead of tending to individual strands, the hair itself, like Prue’s ponytail, rotates, revealing different angles that simulate movement. A great example of this is when you’re watching the movie, during Prue’s flight atop The General. Initially, her hair was down for this scene, but it quickly became a “pain in the ass,” and she was given a ponytail.
I’ve been saying this for years, but no one does stop-motion animation like LAIKA. To see this production up close, hold parts of it in your hands, and be inches away from the film’s hand-crafted props and sets, is nothing short of amazing. In another life, I’d be working at LAIKA, painting faces, printing body parts, or building sets that represent entire worlds. When you watch Wildwood, please keep some of what you learned here in mind as the story unfolds. LAIKA’s mission is to make you forget it’s animated, and from what I’ve seen, it’s easy to go beyond the veil and stay there when this studio is at the helm of your imagination.
Be on the lookout for more from our trip to LAIKA Studios throughout the week, including insight from screenwriter Chris Butler, and an interview with Prue and Curtis voice actors, Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay, respectively.