Due to a scheduling mishap, I was only able to check out two movies on my second day at the Toronto International Film Festival — but I did manage to get an early look at and some fascinating details on one of my most anticipated films this year. Even if you don’t know the name Laika, you probably know the studio’s work; it’s the animation house behind stop-motion hits like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
Over the years Laika’s films have steadily gotten more impressive on both a technical and artistic level. Which brings us to the incredible-looking Wildwood, hitting theaters next month.
If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a look: Some of the crew from Laika was on stage at TIFF to talk about the making of Wildwood, in particular why this film looks more lifelike than the studio’s previous work. There are a few reasons.
One has to do with the animation itself, which, as you can see in the trailer, is incredibly smooth in the new film. “We’re in the midst of the evolution of an art form,” Laika’s head of animation Brad Schiff explained.
“Because we have digital cameras, we’re able to see what we’re doing; we have what we call frame-grabbers.” This lets Laika’s animators see all of the recently-shot frames as they’re animating, allowing them to track every single movement of a puppet, ensuring everything moves smoothly.
“There’s no reason for stuttery animation, other than a stylistic choice,” Schiff said. The puppets themselves are also more advanced.
They utilize an internal “diaphragm” that Laika calls a breather, which the studio first experimented with on its previous film, 2019’s Missing Link. This time, all of the major puppets are outfitted with breathers, and this lets the animators make characters appear to brea the in a lifelike way, so that they seem more human in the final product.
You can see some of that in the trailer above, but I was also able to watch a handful of clips from the film, and — despite Laika stressing that they weren’t final — they looked incredible. One showed a fast and tense bike chase through a bustling version of Portl and, where Wildwood takes place.
There was a speed and tension to it that felt like a live-action sequence. In the movie, a young girl named Prue loses her little brother in an “impassable wilderness” that’s home to a rich fantasy world.
In the clips I saw, she did everything from escaping an ornate mansion filled with guard dogs distracted by their own tails, to soaring above a vast landscape while on the back of a giant bird. Wildwood looked as stylish and detailed as you’d expect from a Laika production, but what impressed me the most was how realistic it all felt in motion.
