LAIKA's *Wildwood* Premieres October 23 After Five Years of Hand-Built Stop-Motion
LAIKA's stop-motion epic fantasy feature Wildwood premieres on October 23, 2026. The film took five years to complete, and The Verge reported the production details in an interview with the director. Tickets are on sale now, according to LAIKA's website.
Travis Knight, the studio's president and CEO, directed the film. He previously directed Kubo and the Two Strings and Bumblebee. LAIKA is based just outside Portland, Oregon, and the studio describes Wildwood as a love letter to that home.
The production relied on a physical build at a scale the studio has not described before. More than 230 puppets were made for the film, and 36 of them were built for the main character, Prue, alone. A team of 49 animators brought the puppets to life, and more than 1,000 artists worked on the film in some form. Certain puppets are fitted with diaphragms, flexible internal parts that animators use to depict breathing. The effect shows up in the characters' smallest movements.
LAIKA calls Wildwood its biggest and most ambitious film to date. Knight told the Associated Press that the film contains everything he loves in one movie, and that it is the best thing LAIKA has ever done.
The most pointed part of Knight's recent remarks concerns generative AI. In his interview with The Verge, he said generative AI is antithetical to everything LAIKA stands for. He said he is steadfastly opposed to technology doing the work of the artist, because he believes the output contains no humanity.
The broader context here is a question studios across the animation industry are working through: where automated tools fit inside a pipeline built around human judgment. Stop-motion makes that question concrete. Each frame is a physical pose, adjusted by hand and photographed, so the performance lives in the puppet and in the person moving it. Knight's position is clear, and it is held by the head of the studio. It is a stance, not a neutral technical assessment, and readers can weigh it against their own views on how generative tools should be used in creative work.
In my view, the most useful way to read the production numbers is as a measure of labor and time. Five years, 49 animators, and more than 1,000 contributors describe a large, slow, deliberate effort, and that is the premise Knight is defending. Whether audiences respond to the handmade texture on screen will be the first real test of that argument, and it comes right after the premiere.
For a technology audience, the film is a useful reference point. The process is visible in the performance itself. The tool is the animator's hands, and the schedule, the crew size, and the puppet count are the constraints the production engineered around.
