Click here to read the full article.
Stop-motion animation is a notoriously time-consuming method to make a film, with most features taking several years of painstakingly detailed work by vast teams of creatives.
But few have likely taken as long as Laika’s
sweeping fantasy epic “Wildwood,” which had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday.
Speaking on stage at the premiere alongside voice stars Carey Mulligan, Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay, director Travis Knight explained the stop-motion process to the audience at the Royal Festival Hall.
“Basically we build thousands and thousands of this tiny little objects, we put them in front of a camera and set lights and we take a picture, we move them a microscopic distance, we take another picture, we move them another microscopic distance, we take another picture,” he said. “And we repeat that process over and over until either the film emerges or society collapses.”
On “Wildwood,” — which Knight had previously acknowledged was the most ambitious Laika had ever attempted — production started in 2021 in the midst of COVID, but the development had actually begun some 10 years earlier, when Laika optioned the book by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis.
“This movie took us 16 years to make,” Knight explains. When we started Barack Obama was a fresh-faced president in his very first term. I could have become a medical doctor twice in the time it took us to make this movie. A child who was born when we started this could have driven me to the premiere.”
Following its world premiere at the London Film Festival, which runs until Oct. 17, “Laika” is due to be released on Oct. 23 by Fathom Entertainment in the U.S. and by Black Bear in the U.K. The film marks the first by Laika to receive a PG-13 rating.
