LAIKA’s Wildwood Gets Its Final Trailer, and It’s ‘The Biggest World LAIKA Has Ever Built’
LAIKA released the final trailer for Wildwood on September 17, giving audiences their fullest look yet at the stop-motion studio’s adaptation of Colin Meloy’s 2011 novel of the same name. Directed by Travis Knight, the film arrives in theaters nationwide on October 23, after runs through two major festival premieres.
What the Trailer Shows
The footage follows teenager Prue McKeel and her friend Curtis as they cross into the forbidden woods just outside Portland, Oregon, searching for Prue’s baby brother Mac, who’s been carried off by a flock of crows working for a grieving, otherworldly woman named Alexandra. What starts as a rescue mission widens into something bigger: the trailer shows talking animals, rival factions fighting over the forest’s fate, and Prue riding on the back of a massive bird deeper into territory the humans of Portland were never meant to see.
Built by Hand, Sixteen Years in the Making
Knight has been developing Wildwood since he optioned Meloy’s book roughly sixteen years ago, with the studio moving into active production in 2021. The finished film uses more than 230 hand-built puppets across over 130 physical sets, and LAIKA’s team 3D-printed roughly 140,000 individual replacement faces to keep every frame of the puppets’ expressions unique, well above the 106,000 faces the studio used for 2019’s Missing Link. At 140 minutes, Wildwood is also the longest stop-motion film LAIKA has made, and it carries the studio’s first ever PG-13 rating.
“Wildwood is the biggest world LAIKA has ever built, and the most personal,” Knight said in the film’s release announcement.
Official character art for Brendan, the Bandit King, voiced by Mahershala Ali
Who’s in the Cast
Peyton Elizabeth Lee voices Prue, with Jacob Tremblay as Curtis. Carey Mulligan plays Alexandra, and Mahershala Ali voices the Bandit King Brendan. The rest of the ensemble includes Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, and Richard E. Grant.
When and Where to See It
Wildwood holds its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11, before crossing the Atlantic to open the 40th AFI Fest in Hollywood on October 21 as that festival’s opening night film. The movie then opens nationwide on October 23, distributed domestically by Fathom Entertainment, with FilmNation Entertainment handling international sales.
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Picture Source: LAIKA
