Behind the Scenes of ‘Wildwood’ at the Design Museum in London

“Technical process” isn’t typically a term that sparks joy, but wait until you hear about Wildwood, the transportive new stop-motion feature that took 16 years to make. “It’s a tour de force of great animation,” says LAIKA Studios CEO and Wildwood director Travis Knight.

The specific occasion? Knight was addressing a well-heeled crowd at the Design Museum in London’s Kensington on Tuesday night, a few days after Wildwood, the new stop-motion film from the studio behind Coraline, premiered at the London Film Festival. The evening, cohosted by Vanity Fair, marked a continuation in the film’s already lengthy journey, with a suitably ambitious exhibition pulling back the curtain on costumes, puppets, props, and diminutive sets.

“LAIKA Presents Wildwood: The Exhibition” traces the studio’s analogue approach—from whimsical drawings and diminutive sets through to 3D-printed facial features and precocious puppets. It’s an insider’s take on miniature locations, handmade costumes, character designs, and custom camera rigs.

Knight was originally drawn to the “beautiful fantasy story” of Wildwood, a best-selling YA book written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis. “There’s extraordinary characters, there’s beautiful locations, there’s these exquisite action sequences,” he tells me. “But that doesn’t sustain you for 16 years, and it doesn’t sustain you for seven years of production. The thing that has to matter to you is the heart and soul of the story underneath everything. The film ultimately is about grief. It’s about loss. It’s about love. It’s about empathy. And those are aspects of the thing that I feel deeply, that I feel profoundly, and things I’ve experienced.”

Beyond the emotional acuity, much of the film’s ambitious methods can feel like an anachronism in 2026. “So much technical know-how, dexterity, storytelling, design, and vision are required to make a cinematic masterpiece,” Design Museum director and CEO Tim Marlow told the gallery attendees. “So much” is right: The film pulled together more than 1,000 creatives and artists who collectively created more than 140,000 puppet masks and more than 130 sets on a 100,000-foot stage in Portland, Oregon. “Everything is fundamentally hands-on,” Marlow went on. “There are 2,775 shots, which by my calculation means it’s over 173,000 frames.”

In a world where AI and algorithms are trumpeting our extinction on a daily basis, Wildwood kicks the conversation in entirely the other direction. “We have these big action sequences. We have these big aerial fights. We’ve got chase scenes. But the hardest stuff to do are the shots where characters are hardly doing anything,” says Brad Schiff, LAIKA’s head of animation. “There’s a lot of emotional intelligence to stop-motion animators.” And a lot of patience. On average, according to Schiff, a full day of shooting results in just one or two seconds of film.

The painstakingly slow pace is rewarded, as a whimsical work is gradually brought to life through a series of frames. “At the end of the work day, you can hit a button and see the life that you’ve created that day,” says Schiff. “It’s so immediately gratifying. And it’s the ultimate magic trick. You’re literally creating life out of an inanimate object.”

For Peyton Elizabeth Lee, who voices the lead character, Prue, alongside actors like Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, and Jacob Tremblay, that experience was quite different. “It was a really unique challenge,” explains Lee, who recorded all the dialogue in a sound booth before the puppets and props had even been created. “I became involved in the project about five years ago, and there was already such a clear image of this film and who the characters were in Travis’s mind. And so it was really just about working with him and collaborating with him so that he could really explain to me what this world was and who Prue was,” she continues. “And then just finding the textures and the nuances of my own voice to really build her character.”

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