Wildwood is the next feature from Laika, the US stop-motion studio behind Coraline. The Verge reports that it drew in a veteran Hollywood cinematographer for his first stop-motion work, and it builds on about 20 years of the studio’s methods.
Key takeaways
- Wildwood is the latest feature from Laika, a studio that has spent roughly two decades specialising in stop-motion animation.
- The Verge reports that cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, whose credits include The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on Wildwood as his first stop-motion project.
- Laika’s earlier features, from Coraline onwards, have each brought in new techniques that a project of Wildwood’s scale would draw on.
- Many details about Wildwood’s release and production are not covered in the source material and remain unconfirmed here.
Wildwood
Wildwood is the newest feature film from Laika, and the trending coverage presents it as the result of the studio’s long history rather than a one-off. The film is adapted from the Wildwood novels, a fantasy series for younger readers about a hidden forest realm beside a modern city. Readers of the books know them for their detailed, hand-illustrated look, which suits a studio whose films are built by hand, one frame at a time.
The source material does not give the plot, cast, running time, budget, release date or distribution plans, and this article does not supply them. What the coverage does say is that the film is a major moment for the studio, with two decades of work leading up to it.
Stop-motion feature films take a long time to make. Every shot needs physical sets, puppets with internal armatures, and animators moving those puppets in tiny steps between exposures. A few seconds of finished footage can take an animator days or weeks. So a stop-motion feature is usually a multi-year job for a large crew, and that partly explains why a studio like Laika releases films years apart rather than every year.
A veteran cinematographer’s first stop-motion project
The Verge’s coverage centres on the film’s cinematographer. The publication reports that Caleb Deschanel has worked in Hollywood for several decades. His credits as cinematographer include The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, he worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and he directed some episodes of Twin Peaks. According to The Verge, none of that fully prepared him for Wildwood, his first stop-motion film.
Most of the details of his experience are not in the summary available here. The general challenge, though, is well understood in the industry. A live-action cinematographer works at human scale. Lights are rigged across whole sets, camera moves are measured in metres, and a scene runs in real time. In stop-motion, the sets are miniature, so light behaves differently on small surfaces and textures. Camera moves are broken into increments repeated across hundreds or thousands of frames, and the lighting has to stay exactly the same for the days it can take to shoot one shot. A small shift in a lamp or a bump to the set can show up as flicker in the finished film.
Bringing in a cinematographer from live action also says something about what the studio is aiming for. Laika has long described its films as cinema made at a small scale, not as a separate category of animation. A camera specialist from conventional filmmaking fits that ambition. The Verge’s interview frames the collaboration as a learning process for an experienced professional, not as a routine hire.
Laika’s two decades of stop-motion features
The “20 years” in the trending headline refers to Laika’s history as a feature studio. Laika grew out of an earlier animation company in Oregon and was set up in the mid-2000s. Its first feature, Coraline, came out in 2009 and was among the first stop-motion features shot in stereoscopic 3D. ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link followed. Each received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.
Across those films, the studio became known for mixing traditional puppet animation with digital manufacturing. Its best-known innovation is replacement animation using 3D-printed faces. Instead of sculpting a puppet’s expressions by hand for each frame, the team prints large libraries of face pieces and swaps them in frame by frame, which allows subtle changes of expression. The studio has also used digital effects to extend sets, remove rigs and add elements too large or complex to build physically, while keeping the puppets and their main performances physical.
This history matters for Wildwood because each film’s tools and staff carry over to the next. A studio that has spent 20 years refining its puppet-making, rigging, printing and lighting has built up skills that would be hard to assemble from scratch. Wildwood is the latest film to draw on that experience. The source does not specify which new techniques, if any, the film introduces.
What Wildwood tells us about stop-motion as a craft
Taken together, the film, the cinematographer’s account and the studio’s track record show why stop-motion keeps a distinct place in animation even though computer-generated imagery dominates the field. Stop-motion is slow and expensive, and it is physically demanding. Studios that commit to it accept long gaps between releases and a high level of technical risk. In return, they get a look that audiences recognise as handmade: real textures, real light falling on real surfaces, and small irregularities that make the work feel physical.
The detail that an experienced cinematographer found the medium new and challenging is telling. Stop-motion is not just a smaller version of live-action filmmaking. It is a separate discipline with its own constraints. Lighting, camera movement and continuity all work differently when every frame is shot by hand on a miniature set over days or weeks. The fact that a studio would bring such a figure onto a project suggests stop-motion filmmakers increasingly see their work as part of mainstream cinema, not a niche of it.
The story also shows how fan and critical attention around a long-awaited animated film tends to focus on process. Interviews with crew members, behind-the-scenes material and discussion of techniques often appear before a release, because the making of a stop-motion film is part of what audiences find interesting. With a gap of several years since the studio’s previous feature, interest in how the film was made is high, even though many basic facts about it are not given in the material available here.
Finally, the coverage points to how hard it is to sustain an independent craft studio. Twenty years of features in one demanding medium is unusual in an industry where animation studios often change direction, merge or close. Wildwood’s reception will show whether that long investment continues to find an audience, but that outcome is not known at the time of writing.
Sources and further reading
- The Verge, entertainment coverage including an interview about Wildwood’s cinematography
- Laika studio materials describing its history and production techniques
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences records of Best Animated Feature nominations
- General reference works on the history and methods of stop-motion animation
Surfaced from the rss:verge signal “stop-motion film release”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
