‘Wildwood Director’ Travis Knight On LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Fantasy Epic

Travis Knight took to the stage at Deadline’s Contenders London event to explain just how much work had gone into making LAIKA’s new release Wildwood. Accompanied by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, composer Dario Marianelli and costume designer Deb Cook, Knight revealed that the legendarily difficult stop-motion process did not exactly make life easy when making a film set in various different magical realms, with murder upon murder of vicious crows, and full-on epic battle scenes.

“For those who don’t know,” said Knight, “the way stop-motion works is that we build thousands and thousands of tiny little [animations]. We put them under set lights, we move them a microscopic distance, take a picture, move them another microscopic distance, take another picture, and you repeat that process over and over and over again until either a movie emerges or society collapses, whichever comes first. And with this one, it actually could have gone either way because it took us 16 years to make this movie. To put that in perspective, Barack Obama was a fresh-faced president in his first term at the time.”

“Stop-motion is very painful” he added. “It’s the absolute worst way there is to make a movie, but I think that it has its own unique beauty and that comes from the fact that it’s made by hand. It’s crafted by these incredible artists and craftsmen who build the world with their own hands. It’s very challenging, but it has a unique feeling. And I think it felt like that was in the DNA of what this story wanted to be: It felt like it was handcrafted. I am a firm believer of the notion that the process of creating art leaves fingerprints on the art itself. And so the fact that we had this whole incredible group of artists and craftsmen who poured years of their lives in devotion into carrying this thing into existence, I think you feel it in the movie itself.”

Unusually for the studio, Wildwood — potentially the first in a series based on the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy — is LAIKA’s first film to be rated PG-13. “There wasn’t really any hesitation in terms of where we were going with the movie,” said Knight, “but I think we wanted to make sure that we were treating it with great care, because we are exploring sophisticated themes, important themes, like loss and grief. And we wanted to make sure that we were treating that sensitively and with care. And I think that one of the things about animation and fantasy is that it provides us a couple of steps removed from the real world. So it allows us to give difficult feelings a shape. And so you go into this fantastic world and hopefully you’re discovering things about your own life and it’s being reflected at you through a different prism.

“I don’t think we should forget that young audiences have complex inner lives as well,” he continued. “Young people know what it is to feel alone, to feel afraid, to feel powerless. And I think stories have an obligation to treat that sensitively and responsibly. We’ve tried to do that with this movie. We ask difficult things, like how far would you go for love? When should you let go? What is the cost of holding on? And how do you keep your heart open when we know how much it costs us? I think the film ultimately arrives at a really light and joyful place — but we earn the light honestly.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.