{"id":640223,"date":"2026-10-24T19:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T19:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640223\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T19:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T19:10:11","slug":"behind-the-scenes-of-laikas-greatest-artistic-feat-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640223\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the scenes of Laika’s greatest artistic feat yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Without a doubt, Laika\u2019s stop-motion epic Wildwood<\/a> is the distillation of the studio\u2019s two decades of evolutione. By 2016, when the studio released Kubo And The Two Strings<\/a>, audiences could already see that Laika had transmuted from a traditional stop-motion studio, like Aardman or ShadowMachine, into its next form.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under the guidance of CEO Travis Knight, Laika\u2019s practical artisans have embraced the incorporation of technologies, like CGI, state-of-the-art armatures, frame grabber software, and live action when warranted. Yet at the heart of Wildwood, with its vast array of locales, characters, and battles, remains the studio\u2019s commitment to steel, silicon, fabrics, and a herculean patience to tell stories frame-by-frame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to tell all types of stories, and that\u2019s why we really embrace technology,\u201d Knight tells The A.V. Club of his expansive ethos regarding stop-motion. \u201cI don\u2019t see any difference between the way we approach it and live action. If it\u2019s story relevant, if a character speaks, or if it\u2019s proximity to camera, those are things that we will do physically. Then we\u2019ll make sure and work with our VFX team in the digital realm to harmonize the look between the two worlds.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd sometimes they don\u2019t get enough credit because the one thing we do get for free is that it looks real,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt looks physical. We spend a lot of time working with [VFX] to make sure that their work looks like the work that\u2019s being done on the stages. It\u2019s a testament to both sets of artists that this film holds together in that way, where you can\u2019t see the seams between digital and physical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laika stop-motion animation supervisor Brad Schiff offers that what they do is far more complicated than the typical binary argument of physical versus digital. \u201cFusing old school craft with modern day technology isn\u2019t just stop-motion and CG. It\u2019s everything within the stop-motion medium, and that means the materials that they build puppets out of can be lighter,\u201d he details. \u201cTo get these kinds of performances, puppets need to be tensioned really lightly. If the materials are dense, you can\u2019t get that type of tension on a puppet to be able to just practically blow on it and get these finite movements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Wildwood<\/p>\n

Wildwood BTS (Image: Laika)<\/p>\n

Schiff says even 3D printers have revolutionized their craft. \u201cFrom Coraline, we had a single-colored resin printer so that all the faces needed to be primed, hand-sanded, and painted. All her freckles need to be painted by hand, so it took over a week to process one of those faces. Now the fidelity is so good and the processing is so quick that we have bespoke faces for every shot in the [Wildwood]. No faces are reused in the film at all, which allows us to get really subtle, emotionally nuanced performances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Special effects supervisor Ollie Jones adds that while their printed heads still have seams, the VFX \u201cseam team\u201d comes in to digitally blend out the joins. \u201cApart from that, what you\u2019re seeing is really what\u2019s coming off the 3D printer,\u201d he says. \u201cThe marvel of the work that gets put into this, the translucency of the material, the complexity of the paint jobs that the team is able to achieve, and then working with the physical silicon department to make sure that that continuity is expressed through arms, through necks, through any other part of the body, that is really part of the illusion in making sure that that those two things are together.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the few outsiders to join Laika\u2019s pipeline for Wildwood was cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion). Wooed by Knight to bring his naturalistic eye to their production, Deschanel says he had never worked with stop-motion but was intrigued. \u201cOf course, I was not told the whole story about how complicated it would become and how difficult,\u201d he laughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re shooting bits and pieces so it\u2019s like putting a giant mosaic together with one little shot at a time,\u201d explains Deschanel. \u201cIt takes a while before the images start to take shape and for you to get an understanding of what you\u2019re creating. All the permutations of it were very, very complicated. But in the end, I\u2019ve always loved solving problems and solving puzzles. I actually took some of the puppets out into the woods and filmed them\u2026to get my head into, \u2018What is the look of this movie that will give it the best sense of its reality?\u2019 And by reality, I mean the reality for this particular movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of many sequences in Wildwood that illustrates the harmony between analog and digital comes in the second act when The General (Angela Bassett) swoops in to save outsider Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) from enemy Alexandra\u2019s (Carey Mulligan) ruthlessly pursuing crows and coyotes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Wildwood<\/p>\n

Wildwood BTS (Image: Laika)<\/p>\n

Together they rocket through the forest, ascend into the clouds and dogfight with a massive murder of crows hot on their tail. \u201cIt\u2019s essentially like a ride in a theme park,\u201d Knight says. \u201cWe used these crazy camera moves that could enhance that. It really was an extraordinary feat of artistry and craftsmanship and engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the minutes-long sequence, the furthest environments and set extensions are CG, as well as the waterfall, river water, and the cloud augmentations. For close-ups, production designer Nelson Lowry built sections of the riverbed, roads, and forest. And then the General and Prue are puppets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really wanted people to believe in this bird,\u201d Jones says. \u201cThis bird is a giant compared to Prue; she\u2019s 50 feet tall. We needed her to be bird-like, but she had to emote like a real character. We spent a lot of time trying to balance out how we would deal with things like breathing and shoulder movement. I didn\u2019t know before we started making this that birds have a fused clavicle, so we had to think about\u2014are we going to actually honor that, or do we want to have a little bit more expression and more real estate to work with so this character can emote?\u201d<\/p>\n

In previous films, Laika fabricators used silicon to build characters but they decided to build The General out of fabric feathers so she wasn\u2019t too heavy to animate. \u201cShe has this gold thread that runs through the polysatin, so she\u2019s modulated,\u201d Jones explains. \u201cAs she\u2019s moving against the dawn sky, she\u2019s actually shimmering a little bit, and we\u2019re trying to make sure that we can balance that aesthetic and the legitimacy of the performance that Brad\u2019s team is going to deliver.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Schiff confirms they used 3,000 individual feathers on The General, with the tips wired so they could be animated. \u201cBirds are so streamlined in real life that their feathers really don\u2019t move a whole lot. We had to move them more to make her feel more alive. The counterpoint to that is we have Prue on the back of her, so basically she\u2019s on the outside of a plane with this ponytail that, in actuality, would just be going all over the place. We had to dial that back. The ponytail was moved much less to give it a very lucid kind of feeling, but that it would feel authentic. You don\u2019t notice that that\u2019s moving less than it actually would, or the feathers are moving more than they actually would. Both of those things really help come together to make it feel more alive in our world.\u201d<\/p>\n

For The General\u2019s face, Schiff says the animators control her eyes because they\u2019re the windows to the soul. \u201cThat\u2019s where you\u2019re going to get all of the emotion,\u201d he points out. \u201cSo, the animators are able to control the eyeball independent of the lids, and the lids, independent of the eye, to help get the emotion that they\u2019re trying to get out of each performance.\u201d The VFX team then smooth movements around the eye.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Wildwood<\/p>\n

Wildwood BTS (Image: Laika)<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Deschanel\u2019s camera, which is far from static, following along, twisting up the eagle\u2019s body and shifting perspectives to capture the breathless pace of the chase. \u201cWhen the bird flies away, it\u2019s actually a camera pulling away from it, so you see it go away; everything\u2019s kind of in reverse of what you\u2019re seeing,\u201d Deschanel explains. \u201cThere are a couple of complicated shots in there where they actually had to use two or three stop-motion cameras to achieve it. The camera would move to a certain point, and then it would be mounted on another one to get around to the front, and then another one to move it up to the top. There were 97 motion control rigs used, with a whole team of people and technicians who really know how to do that. The camera guys taught me a lot. They did all the programming, and really created that feeling of flight from the bird, and of course, the incredible animation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knight adds that The General and Prue were hand-animated by \u201cgenius animator\u201d Dobrin Yanev, one frame at a time, over two years to complete the sequence. \u201cHe brought this extraordinary puppet into such vivid life,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just a stunning thing to behold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laika currently doesn\u2019t have a next film greenlit as the box office for Wildwood will determine the scale of the studio\u2019s future ambitions. Regardless, Knight says Wildwood feels like the culmination of everything they\u2019ve done over the 20 years of Laika\u2019s existence. \u201cIt required us to do things that we\u2019d never tried before and things we\u2019d been scared of even attempting before,\u201d he admits. \u201cHow the team rose to its challenge and what they accomplished, it makes me less fearful of failure because I look at this and I say, \u2018This team can do anything.\u2019 Any story that we fall in love with and have a desire and an ability to tell, I know this team can pull it off because they can do absolutely anything. On some level, that\u2019s very, very liberating. But every story asks something different of you, and Wildwood asked a lot of us in a lot of different ways.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI know some of the stories that we were developing might not necessarily be the scale of Wildwood, but they push animation and they push our team into very uncomfortable territories,\u201d he says of the future. \u201cThey will challenge us in different ways, and that\u2019s one of the many things that excites the artists and the craftspeople at our studio, which is we really want to push the art form into places it\u2019s never been. As I look ahead at the stories that we\u2019re developing, that tradition will continue.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Without a doubt, Laika\u2019s stop-motion epic Wildwood is the distillation of the studio\u2019s two decades of evolutione. By…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-640223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}