It doesn’t get much better — or more ambitious — than Laika Studios. The Oregon-based animation house has spent the last 20 years crafting breathtaking, painstakingly built stop-motion worlds, offering some much-needed disruption to the increasing sameness that studios like Disney and DreamWorks have fallen prey to. 2025 has been a big year for Laika: it hit a major milestone in its 20th anniversary, and soon, it’ll unveil what co-founder Travis Knight calls the studio’s most ambitious film yet.
Five years after The Missing Link, Laika is back with a new adventure set in its own backyard of Portland: Wildwood. The film, based on Colin Meloy’s novel of the same name, follows the adventures of the 13-year-old Prue as she journeys into a fantastical realm in her own backyard. After her baby brother is abducted by a murder of crows, Prue teams up with a majestic eagle companion known as the General (voiced by Angela Bassett) to rescue him. Per Knight, Wildwood is an undertaking that’s been a decade in the making — and with Laika’s first look behind the scenes, it’s easy to see why.
