Animation Has Become A Computer-Generated Industry. LAIKA Would Rather Do It By Hand.

I’m looking at a box of faces. That sounds a little creepy, but it is a little creepy looking at the box of carefully arranged miniature resin masks that LAIKA visual effects artist Brian McLean is showing me, and a handful of other journalists touring LAIKA’s labyrinthine studio in Portland, Oregon. For one: they don’t have eyes, because they’re designed to be magnetically popped onto a puppet of Prue McKeel, the teenage girl protagonist of Wildwood. The fantasy epic is the latest feature film from the independent animation studio co-founded by Kubo and the Two Strings (and now Masters of the Universe) director Travis Knight.

“One of the great joys for me in doing stop motion is the sort of high-tech, low-tech [practice].”

Knight also directs Wildwood, though he’s nowhere to be seen as we wander LAIKA’s winding, slightly stuffy halls (it’s Portland in the middle of July, so it can’t be helped). Instead, we talk to the animators and visual effects artists of Wildwood as we’re taken on a tour through the various sets. Here, a meticulous re-creation of a street in contemporary Portland; next, a cavernous medieval hall buried in the roots of a massive oak tree; then, a crumbling French château modeled after Portland’s real-life Pittock Mansion; next, a sprawling battlefield littered with shattered cannons and shattered puppet bodies; and finally, a dense wood half-covered in shadows, the LED lights above being diffused by a gauzy white sheet and some laser-cut metal branches, giving the illusion of real leaves being cast on top of the resin trees. I know that it’s all fabricated and built by human hands (and various other tools), but I can’t help but feel enchanted by the whole picture — it feels real, like this wood sprouted from reality. But that’s just the beauty of the tactile animation practices of LAIKA, which prides itself on keeping alive the traditional method of stop-motion animation, with a few high-tech tweaks.

“One of the great joys for me in doing stop motion is the sort of high-tech, low-tech [practice],” production designer Nelson Lowry says. “It's just kind of fun to watch a movie that has some of the most cutting-edge visuals, and then there's like chicken wire. That appeals to me a lot. And we really lean into that because this is more like live action than people realize, so much that we’re building physical assets, to stages, and lighting them.”

A Long Road to Wildwood

Wildwood, based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, follows Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a high school girl whose infant brother Mac is suddenly kidnapped and taken into the Wildwood, a mysterious and enchanted forest that lies just on the outskirts of contemporary Portland. Prue and her nerdy friend Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) venture into the Wood and encounter a place out of time, populated by talking animals, ancient soldiers, and a dangerous sorceress (voiced by Carey Mulligan). It’s an epic undertaking unlike anything LAIKA has done before — but then again, so are most of its films.

Wildwood began production in earnest in 2021, but has been in development at LAIKA, in some form or another, since 2011. It sounds like a slow and careful process because it always is for LAIKA: the studio has been dedicated to the art of stop-motion animation since its inaugural film, Henry Selick’s Coraline, hit theaters in 2009. Nearly two decades and five films later, LAIKA is committed to using CGI as little as possible and sticking to the old-school stop-motion techniques; instead, it’s focused on evolving its very specific brand of technology.

“Every time we're trying to find ways to get the best materials, the best technology, the best 3D printers, the best infrastructure to support what we have finally been able to achieve on Wildwood.”

“Coraline was the first film that ever had 3D-printed replacement faces,” McLean says. The technique of replacement animation — aka showing different facial expressions or sculpts by taking pictures of them and replacing them with another sculpt — is “pretty old,” McLean says, but for Coraline, the team at LAIKA sped up the painstaking process by using 3D printers to create these sculpts en masse.

He continues, “That technique was groundbreaking at the time, and it really pushed performances to a whole new level for stop motion animation. And we have not taken our feet off the gas for really pushing this technology. Every single film that we have produced at LAIKA uses this idea of 3D-printed replacement animated faces. Every time we're trying to find ways to get the best materials, the best technology, the best 3D printers, the best infrastructure to support what we have finally been able to achieve on Wildwood.”

So how did Wildwood take this technology to the next level? “Bespoke facial animation for every single shot in the film,” McLean says.

All About the Faces

I take another look at the faces. Looking a little closer, they do look slightly different — it’s like someone broke down every single muscle movement in Prue’s face and laid them out neatly in a row. That’s intentional, McLean tells us, as he takes one of the masks and pops it on the puppet of Prue, who, briefly — without a face — looks a little like a terrifying Terminator with the bulging eyeballs and metal skeleton. But as soon as the mask pops into place, so does everything else.

McLean explains that on Wildwood, LAIKA is no longer reusing faces. What does that mean? In the “early days” of Coraline, ParaNorman, or The Boxtrolls, LAIKA’s animators would create “kits of expressions.” Think shapes that your mouth makes to say words or sounds. “If you create those expressions and you photograph them in different orders, you can build dialogue, you can build the character saying words,” McLean explains.

But that is no longer the case with Wildwood. Each expression has a bespoke mask, or sculpt, dedicated to it.

“The truth of the matter is no director wants to be told that they're having to use the same smile at the end of the movie as they use in the beginning of the movie,” McLean says, “because every character goes on an emotional journey, a character arc. We always felt like we were kind of limited and we weren't able to deliver what the director really wanted, which was the ability to have the character always going through a new emotion.”

The box we’re looking at has 24 faces. “This represents one second of footage,” McLean says.

Setting Records

I was on the set of Missing Link, LAIKA’s last feature film, seven years ago. I remember the visual effects artists touting it as the biggest production the studio had ever done. They had even set a record — they made the Guinness World Record for the largest number of 3D-printed faces in a stop-motion animated movie. The Missing Link had 106,000 faces. Wildwood has 140,000.

“We beat that record, obviously, on this show,” McLean says. “And we don't do this because it's faster. We don't do it because it's cheaper. We don't do it because it takes less people. I mean, when people ask, I've been doing this for a long time, they want to understand, why would you 3D print faces first? There must be some logical reason that is saving you money or time or people. And the answer to all those questions is no; everything is actually more expensive, more time-consuming. The only reason we do it is because of what it provides our facial animation and our character performances.”

The faces are just the tip of the iceberg for LAIKA’s incredible commitment to handmade art. The Wildwood production features 136 sets and 231 practical puppets. The armatures, or the skeletons for the silicone puppets, are also 3D printed, as are the musculature. They even used 3D printing to simulate water.

Ollie Jones, the Head of Character and Practical FX at LAIKA, is showing us the puppet of Prue. “This is made out of steel balls and sockets, hinges, screws,” he says, “and essentially hasn't really changed since King Kong. But we've been able to really elevate the techniques and really make the best tool possible to get lifelike performance.”

“That's this amazing sort of Santa's workshop filled with tinkerers and inventors and craftspeople and amazing artists that have the tools, the experience and the pure grit to try to figure it out.”

There are too many details to name — the rigs created for the scenes of Prue flying on a giant eagle, with specific robotic mechanics implanted in her clothing and in the feathers to simulate wind movement; the giant looming trees that have been created to look just like the ones in Portland’s Forest Park; the mansion with working lights.

“It’s hard,” McLean admits, “because it requires invention. If you're trying to make this thing look amazing and then perform at the standards we want, it's inevitable that you have to sort of tear the thing apart and just come up with a whole new way of building something.”

“And that's this amazing sort of Santa's workshop filled with tinkerers and inventors and craftspeople and amazing artists that have the tools, the experience and the pure grit to try to figure it out,” he continues. “That's the most important thing is the support that the studio gives us because innovation doesn't come easy.”

Wildwood opens in theaters October 23.