LAIKA Studios' stop-motion adventure Wildwood premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11 and received an uncommon rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is also considered a possible nominee for Best Animated Feature at the 2027 Oscars. Following the premiere, Wildwood is set to hit screens on October 23.

LAIKA Studios is best known for its 2009 adaptation of Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Wildwood was released seven years after the studio's last movie, Missing Link, was shipped in 2019. The film's director, Travis Knight, shared that Wildwood's production began in 2021, but development started about 10 years earlier. "This movie took us 16 years to make," Knight said.

The film, written by Chris Butler, is based on an eponymous novel written by Colin Meloy, lead singer and songwriter for The Decemberists, and illustrated by Carson Ellis. The 2011 novel is the first entry in Meloy the fantasy adventure series.

The film is a fantasy coming-of-age story about a seventh-grader, Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), as she and her classmate Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay) embark on an adventure in an enchanted forest beyond Portland to rescue Prue's little brother, Mac (Arthur Knight), after crows abduct him. Prue has to make her way through a world of magical creatures, bandits, and talking animals to bring Mac home. It's the studio's first PG-13-rated film.

As for the stop-motion technique, the film's director, Travis Knight, said that the animators repeat the meticulous process of building and animating little objects in front of the camera "over and over until either the film emerges or society collapses." The fascinating stop-motion technique was previously highly praised by Guillermo del Toro as a rare AI-proof kind of art.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at LAIKA's stop-motion creative techniques:

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