Laika is known for beautiful stopmotion animation, but its next movie looks set to take that reputation to a new level in its scope, ambition and technical accomplishment. The studio that made Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings has released the teaser trailer for Wildwood, and viewers are stunned by the movie's epic scale and fluid animation.
Wildwood is an adaptation of the 2011 children's fantasy novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and illustrated by Carson Ellis. The first book in The Wildwood Chronicles trilogy follows two seventh-graders, Prue and Curtis, as they enter the magical Impassable Wilderness in Portland, Oregon, to rescue their baby brother.
True to Laika's signature animation style, the film combines traditional stop‑motion with CGI enhancements (also see how Laika animates water). This maintains the tactile quality of stop motion, which suits the dark, whimsical fantasy of the story, but there's also a fluidity in the action sequences and a depth in of emotional performance that can be hard to achieve in the medium.
The comments on YouTube are full of praise for the teaser, with some describing it as the most beautiful trailer they've seen. It notably eschews the familiar tropes of a dramatic voiceover, drum rolls or spoilers, instead providing a compilation of stunning shots with little context, set to M83's My Tears Are Becoming a Sea. There's perhaps a subtle jibe at AI in the text 'From the hands that made Coraline'.
Director Travis Knight has described the scope of Wildwood as being “as big as Lord of the Rings,” due to the dozens of characters, sprawling battles and richly detailed world-building. The studio created 136 sets, many large enough for animators to walk through, and over 230 practical puppets.
As an example of the painstaking artistry behind the film, The General, the giant golden eagle that Prue rides, required 9,000 individually hand‑crafted feathers attached to a flexible fabric skin across two versions of the puppet (see in the behind-the-scenes video below).
The movie's voice cast matches the ambition of the project, including Carey Mulligan, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Mahershala Ali, Jacob Tremblay and Tom Waits.
Wildwood will be released on October 23, 2026.
