Wildwood: How Laika Built Breathing Puppets for Its Next Stop-Motion Film

Laika's crew took the stage at TIFF to detail the making of Wildwood, the studio's next animated feature film.

The session, listed in TIFF's 2026 programme as 'Wildwood: Inside the Performance', focused on performance and puppet fabrication rather than plot teasers. TIFF describes the project as LAIKA's epic new fantasy adventure. Laika is the stop-motion animation studio behind ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings, according to event coverage The Verge.

Wildwood was directed by Travis Knight. Laika unveiled a teaser trailer for the film at Cannes, and has since released the first official trailer The Hollywood Reporter.

The production numbers are large, even for stop motion, where movement is built one frame at a time. Wildwood features 233 puppets. Thirty-six of those are versions of the central character Prue. The film was brought to life by 49 animators. It took 231 weeks from start to finish.

Much of the scale is in puppet engineering. Brad Schiff, Laika's head of animation, described an internal diaphragm system the studio calls a "breather." The device sits inside the puppet torso and cycles subtly, like a slow inhale and exhale, to make characters appear to breathe on camera. Laika first experimented with breather technology on its 2019 film Missing Link. For Wildwood, all of the major puppets are outfitted with breathers.

That decision changes shot continuity. A static puppet holds perfectly still between frames. A breathing puppet does not. Animators must account for constant, low-amplitude chest motion, meaning small and steady, while still hitting precise poses for dialogue, walk cycles, the repeated step pattern that creates a walk, and interaction with sets and other puppets.

Wildwood takes place in Portland. In Wildwood, a young girl named Prue loses her little brother in an impassable wilderness that is home to a fantasy world. Laika says the film is anchored in a fictionalized version of Portland, and describes it as a love letter to the studio's home just outside Portland, Oregon. The studio also describes Wildwood as a tale of love, loss, sacrifice, and secrets, and as a handcrafted epic fantasy Laika. The cast includes a character called The General, described as a fierce warrior and leader of the skies.

Wildwood is scheduled to arrive in theaters on October 23, 2026. Laika partnered with Fathom Entertainment for U.S. theatrical distribution Laika. TIFF's 2026 edition is presented by Rogers TIFF.

The broader context here is what physical detail costs. In CG animation and in real-time game engines, breathing is cheap. A rig parameter drives the chest, secondary motion is procedural, added by software, and iteration is fast. In stop motion, every increment of life has a material cost in machining, assembly, maintenance, and animator time. Laika chose to pay it across every major character.

In my view, that choice is easier to understand if you separate novelty from consistency. A breathing mechanism that appears in one close-up is a trick. The same mechanism installed across an entire cast is infrastructure. It means breathing does not have to be cheated with lighting, editing, or held poses. It is present whether the camera wants it or not. The relevant comparison is not to more expressive CG faces but to always-on systems like global illumination or physics simulation, where the payoff is coherence across shots rather than a single showcase moment.

Worth flagging is the maintenance question that follows. Two hundred thirty-three puppets, dozens of Prue variants, and breathers in every hero build imply a fabrication and repair pipeline running in parallel with animation for more than four years. Stop motion already requires duplicate puppets for damage, costume changes, and parallel unit work. Adding an active internal mechanism adds failure modes, calibration, and wear. Laika committed to that overhead at a time when much of the industry is trying to remove physical overhead entirely. That is why the 231-week figure matters. It reframes Wildwood less as a single film and more as a manufacturing run with a theatrical release at the end of it. Audiences still respond to objects that were actually touched, lit, and moved by hand, and tools like the breather narrow the gap between puppet and performer without abandoning the puppet itself.