When stop motion master Phil Tippett first saw the CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, he famously said, ‘I think I’m extinct’ – and many would have agreed. Stop motion looked like something from a bygone era, replaced with supposedly superior digital effects. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine those eventual raptors being rendered by anything other than computers. However, it’s equally difficult to keep a good artform down, and this is evident in Laika Studio’s latest release, Wildwood, which keeps the flag flying for stop motion.
Let’s look at some statistics. Wildwood was in development for 16 years, seven of which were spent on primary filming and animation. It is the longest stop motion film ever produced, weighing in at 2 hours and 20 minutes. Each scene took around 5 months to produce and required over 30 separate faces to be individually printed. It features almost 3000 shots and 250 unique puppets. Mad, right?
And that’s all very well, but even with all this insane artistic and technological effort, is it actually any good?
Frankly, yes. This is the story of Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who, after her brother Mac is kidnapped by a flock of crows, must navigate the Impassable Wilderness with her geeky schoolfriend Curtis (Jacob Trembley) to track him down. Discovering that he has been taken by the Dowager Governess witch Alexandra (Cary Milligan), who is desperately trying to resurrect her own dead son, she must traverse talking animals, corporate bureaucracy, bandits and a looming civil war to rescue her toddler sibling.
Laika already have fine back catalogue, with Coroline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings already in their armoury, but Wildwood takes this to a completely new level – it’s difficult to see how they could ever surpass it. This is an absolute masterpiece of storytelling and animation. It is honestly impossible to realise how complex some of the battle scenes must have been from a stop motion perspective, but at the same time, a single tear down the cheek of Prue has much more impact than any of those technological works of art.
Director Travis Knight has overseen four other films since Wildwood started development, most recently helming the wildly underrated 2026 version of Masters of the Universe. But the success of Wildwood cannot be put at the feet of one person. Wildwood is a passion project consisting of hundreds of the most talented people you could imagine – writers, storyboarders, engineers, animators, material experts – and makes CGI seem as dated as CGI made stop motion seem back in 1993.
I hope Phil Tippett enjoyed this as much as I did.
Wildwood is out in Cinemas on October 23rd.
Review by Colin Lomas
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List