Since its release, Wildwood has been surprising animation lovers all around the world with the immense scale the movie takes to tell this beautiful, gothic adventure story about doing whatever it takes to bring back the loved ones you lose.

In an interview with Nexus Point News, Travis Knight discussed what made Wildwood the right film for the studio, the length it took to make this film, his experience at the world premiere and London Film Festival, respecting their audience’s complex emotions, and what’s next for LAIKA.

LAIKA has an eye for choosing stories that translate well to its filmmaking style. What was it that caught LAIKA’s attention all those years ago?

Travis Knight: When I first encountered Wildwood, it was 2010, so 16 years ago. At the time, the only film that we had made was Coraline, which came out in 2009, so it was a year later. Wildwood has been part of the LAIKA story for almost as long as we’ve been in existence. I heard that Colin Malloy, who is an extraordinary singer-songwriter and is the frontman of the band Decembrists. I heard he was working on a book, and I was immediately intrigued because I was a huge fan of the Decembrists. So, I got an early peek at the manuscript as he was writing it, and I fell in love immediately. I was completely smitten with it. It was this grand fantasy; it was weird, it was cool, and it was fantastic. There was great spectacle, but there was also great heart, and I immediately wanted to make it.

I checked with Colin; we figured out, “Okay, we’re going to do this together.” We held hands and jumped off the cliff together. I knew I wanted to make it, but the problem was I didn’t know how because it was too vast. It was too ambitious and challenged, and we just simply were not ready to take on something of this scale. That essentially began this 16-year gestation period and journey of trying to figure out how we could do this book justice, how we could make it. The early part is just figuring out the story, characters, script, and the themes, then slowly you start bringing other artists into the process. You design the world, and then eventually you start making the movie, and here we are in 2026, and we’re finally done.

It’s quite impressive. During the Q&A, you mentioned how young Jacob [Tremblay] was when he got on board. It’s impressive to see how everything worked out well in the end, because it seems like there could have been a lot of errors along the way, but it just worked out perfectly.

Travis Knight: Look, it’s a miracle any film ever gets made. It’s a miracle a stop-motion film exists. There are so many individual acts of care and devotion and expression that goes into making one of these things. It really is astonishing that it hangs together at all, but it does. Part of it is that I’m just so fortunate in this community that we’ve created at LAIKA, filled with the most exceptional artists and craftspeople and technicians and people who really deeply care about what they’re doing. It is very easy for things to drip, particularly when you’re working on something for so many years that if you’re not careful, you can lose sight of the story that you’re telling, and it becomes something other than what you intended it to be.

But for me, for this one, there was always an emotional core at it that was so primal and meant so much to me personally that it was something I knew I was never going to lose sight of. That was our North Star constantly, and that’s one of the things that kept the whole thing together.

You mentioned Coraline; that was almost 20 years ago now, and there’s so much you and the team at LAIKA have learned about stop-motion over that time. What was something new you learned while making Wildwood?

Travis Knight: Oh, dear God! You know, in the time since we made Coraline, we made five films before we made Wildwood, and it was five films of innovation, of artistic excellence, and growth, and technological advancements. All of which gave me confidence that, “Okay, I think we can take a movie of this scale on.” But I was wrong because we weren’t ready. That was seven years ago when I said, “All right, guys, we’re making Wildwood.” Then COVID hit, and the entire world fell apart; the world was on fire, and we had to figure out how to navigate all these things. Meanwhile, we had to try to figure out how to make a movie in a very, very different way than we’d ever done before. Everything from the lighting to the cinematography to how we built puppets for our action sequences – they were all completely rethinking how something was done within this medium.

It was challenging, and you know, if you talk to Ollie Jones, you talk to our team; they’ll talk to you about how we had to completely rethink how we made these puppets because what I wanted out of the performance is how I really wanted these characters to feel alive and naturalistic. It put a great strain and had lifted the bar for the actual physical manufacturing of these and the technological innovation that goes into making these things. In terms of animation, I really wanted beautiful, well-observed performances. I wanted these things to feel alive. I did not want them to feel like little dolls. I did not want them to feel like little puppets. I wanted them to feel like people, and when I see these inert assemblages of steel and silicon and fabric, they completely spring to life on screen as if they’re alive. I think that’s magic, and I’m very moved by that.

Honestly, it’s just beautiful getting to see it all come together on screen. I was going to get ahead of myself and talk about a scene, but I’ll get to that a bit later. What made the London Film Festival the best place to premiere Wildwood to the world?

Travis Knight: I love London. The London Film Festival is very prestigious. The fact that they allowed us to be a part of this process was a huge honour. Part of it’s timing because as long as we’ve been working on this film, we only finished the film a handful of weeks ago. We got it down to the wire. We used every moment that we could to make this movie, and just barely ahead of our release date, which is a little over a week away.

But the London Film Festival, it’s the platform for all these extraordinary films, and I felt like this film deserved to be on that stage. The first time I’ve ever seen the film with a real audience was just a couple days ago at the premiere, and that was this huge venue, that insane venue [Royal Festival Hall], with, like, what, 2000 people or something like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room with that many people watching a movie. There’s a lot of people in there. There’s a lot of people, and I was completely wracked with nerves. My muscles in my shoulders were knotted up because as much as you love something, you don’t know if other people are going to respond to it, and I was so relieved and so delighted that people really, really seemed to respond to the film. That just gives me no small amount of joy.

Wildwood is a movie that seemingly doesn’t dumb things down for its younger audience. Why is it important to give this level of respect to your audience when making a film?

Travis Knight: Well, I mean, part of it is the story that you’re telling and the experience you want the audience to have. Some films can be a trifle, and you just want people to forget the world and escape and just laugh for two hours. This film explores deep and meaningful aspects of what it means to be human. There’s some profound emotion in this film, and I think that, unfortunately, we live in an era where a lot of modern films do speak down to the audience, where they do not appreciate, particularly a young audience’s emotional complexity, but young people do have complex emotional lives.

I think back to my own experiences. I see my children, and I know plenty of young people. They know what it’s like to be afraid and to be powerless and to have people taken away from them. They know what it’s like for adults to lie to them. If we’re going to tell a story about that, we need to treat those things honestly and with respect and respect the people who’ve gone through that, and so we never ever in any film that we’ve ever done speak down to the audience, but particularly for a movie like this that is about something that’s so precious to me, it was important that we treated these things honestly and with authenticity and with respect, and I hope we’ve done that.

Wildwood is the longest stop-motion animated film by runtime. I’d imagine the battle sequence took the team a long time, but I wanted to ask you, which scene actually took the longest?

Travis Knight: It all took forever. It’s all so slow. The battle sequence was absolutely the most technically challenging thing that we’ve ever done for obvious reasons. It was so, so hard to do. The big aerial dogfight that we have is kind of one of the centrepieces of the movie, where Prue is flying in the back of this giant golden eagle. That was incredibly challenging to do. So those things I think people can understand. Those are tricky to pull off, but I would say the scenes that are just as hard and probably more meaningful are these quiet moments of intimacy because that’s really where the heart of the movie is. You see a child having a difficult conversation with her parents. You see a woman grieving the loss of her son. You see a girl forgiving her father.

Those very, very quiet moments where the puppets are hardly doing anything at all. They’re just alive and breathing and shifting their weight and kind of subtly moving their eyes. Those are moments that capture the heart and the spirit, and I think the deep care that’s involved in making the movie, and if those moments don’t work, if you stop seeing these characters as people and you see them as a puppet, it all falls apart. So, the bar is very high for an extraordinary performance on the part of the animators, and if they can hit that, and I think not only did they hit that, they exceeded it, your heart goes out to these people who have never lived. These are just puppets, and yet we see our lives reflected back at us, and we think they’re alive, and I think that’s just an extraordinary magic trick.

Is there anything that you can tease fans about just the future of LAIKA and the direction they’re heading in?

Travis Knight: I would say that we’ve got a lot of super cool projects that we’re developing that are coming down the pipe. You know, as I think anyone who’s seen what we do knows, these things take a while. So, we will not have another animated film out in the world for a bit, but I can guarantee you that the next film that comes out of our shop will be something special. It’ll be unlike anything that you’ve ever seen before, and that’s why we do what we do. We love to tell stories. We love to tell original stories, and we love to connect with audiences, and I think that when I think about the things that we’ve got cooking, they’re very, very special and I can’t wait for people to se them. Although, because it’s stop motion, they will have to wait to see them.

Wildwood is out now in theatres.