Watch the final trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJQGtSeLPII
Most film studios would treat fifteen years in development as a sign that something had gone badly wrong. Laika treats it as roughly the time required to glue the feathers on. The Portland stop-motion studio optioned Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s children’s novel Wildwood back in 2011, mere weeks after the book came out, and the finished film finally arrives in cinemas on 23 October. A fresh batch of clips has been doing the rounds this week as the marketing department clears its throat for one last push.
The setup will be familiar to anyone raised on a diet of The Box of Delights and wardrobes with dodgy back panels. Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is an espresso-sipping Portland teenager who believes she has the world thoroughly figured out, right up until a murder of crows makes off with her baby brother, Mac, and carries him into the Impassable Wilderness: a forbidden forest on the edge of the city that nobody is supposed to know exists. In she goes after him, with her hapless classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) in tow. Laika’s own blurb describes Curtis as a lad who loves fantasy, comic books and anyone willing to listen to him talk about either, which covers a fair slice of this magazine’s readership and at least two of its editors.
What they find is less Hundred Acre Wood and more Watership Down with a standing army. There are talking animals, a bandit king, an avian principality presided over by a wise old owl, a coyote army burrowed into tunnels beneath the trees, and a grief-stricken former ruler of the woods called Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), whose determination to put right an old wrong looks likely to set the whole forest on fire. The final trailer leans hard into the war-in-the-woods angle, and keen-eyed viewers have already spotted trebuchets. It is not every family film that brings siege engines.
The voice cast is the sort normally assembled for a Merchant Ivory garden party. Mahershala Ali plays Brendan, the Bandit King. Angela Bassett is the General, a golden eagle whose two puppets, one built for flight and one for close-up performance, required more than 9,000 hand-crafted feathers between them. Somewhere in Portland there is an animator who will never look at a pillow the same way again. Richard E. Grant, Awkwafina, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg and Jemaine Clement fill out the ranks, alongside Tom Waits, whose voice already sounds as if it has been left out in a wood for several winters.
The numbers are suitably absurd. Laika says the film used 233 puppets, more than 1,000 artists and craftspeople, and 2,804 shots captured over 231 weeks. It also runs well past the two-hour mark, which makes it the longest stop-motion feature ever made, sailing past the 117 minutes of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Ray Harryhausen spent a career making seven skeletons look busy; Laika has built an entire ecosystem. In America, it is also the studio’s first film to land a PG-13, for strong fantasy violence and bloody images, so parents who thought Coraline‘s button eyes were the outer limit of Laika’s capacity to haunt small children may want to adjust their expectations.
Travis Knight directs, having also delivered this summer’s Masters of the Universe, so he has gone from He-Man to hand-feathered eagles inside a single year. Chris Butler (ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings) wrote the script, and the Oscar-winning cinematographer Caleb Deschanel had to learn the peculiar discipline of shooting a world that moves a millimetre at a time. It is Laika’s first feature since Missing Link in 2019, and the studio has been quite pointed about selling it as handmade cinema in an age of automation. Nobody, as yet, has trained a machine to glue 9,000 feathers onto an eagle, and here at SFcrowsnest we would quite like it to stay that way.
The early signs are encouraging. Wildwood had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October, and the first wave of critics has been reaching for the very top shelf of superlatives, with The Wrap placing it among the most astonishing animated films ever made. In the US it is being released by Fathom Entertainment, the outfit whose Coraline re-release took $56 million worldwide, with premium fan screenings from 19 October before the wide release on 23 October, the same day it reaches British cinemas.
Fifteen years is a long time to wait for anything that isn’t a Royal Mail parcel. Then again, nobody ever asked Harryhausen to hurry up either.
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