Fall Movie Preview: In an AI world, Laika makes handmade wonders — and 'Wildwood'

NEW YORK (AP) — Travis Knight, the chief executive of the stop-motion animation studio Laika, wasn’t prepared for the response to the teaser for his new film, “Wildwood.”

Almost immediately, it went viral. The early trailer rapidly gained more than 90 million views on YouTube, galvanized by people awed by the apparent scale and emotional depth of Laika’s most ambitious film yet. Sample comment: “AI is the future. Laika: Hold my meticulously handcrafted stop motion beer.”

“People that I worked with — hardened industry folks with wizened black husks of hearts — were sending me text messages: ‘Jesus Christ, your trailer just made me cry,’” Knight says, chuckling.

Why did Knight's strange, indie stop-motion animated movie resonate so strongly?

“The making of the art leaves fingerprints on the art,” Knight surmises. “And I think people feel that.”

There’s no shortage of people proclaiming that AI is the future. There are significantly fewer proselytizing about stop-motion animation’s assured destiny. But Laika, the Portland, Oregon-based studio, has for two decades tried to keep an old movie art form alive while mixing in more modern, computer-generated advances. (“We’re not Amish,” promises Knight.)

The studio’s first release in 2009, Henry Selick’s “Coraline,” is still its most beloved. But Laika’s commitment to handcrafted filmmaking and darkly gothic tales has won a loyal following over the years, even though its last release was the 2019 flop “Missing Link.”

Yet “Wildwood” might always have been what Laika was building toward. The film, which opens in theaters Oct. 23, is based on Colin Meloy’s 2011 fantasy novel, illustrated by Carson Ellis. Set in Portland, it’s about a teenage girl named Prue McKee (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) whose infant brother is kidnapped by a flock of crows and taken into an enchanted forest. The voice cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Jake Johnson and Jacob Tremblay.

The film, heavy with grief and radiant with adventure, isn’t just in Laika’s tonal sweet spot. It’s set in its backyard.

“It’s everything I love in one film,” Knight said in a recent exclusive interview. “I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done at Laika.”

It was also the biggest challenge. Knight, the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight (who’s chairman of Laika and has helped bankroll it), acquired the rights to “Wildwood” before it was released. The adaptation is some 16 years in the making.

“I felt like we had to develop the tools, the tricks, the technologies to actually do justice to this story. We built on all of our learnings from our earlier movies and stood on those shoulders. I felt like: OK, I think we’re ready to do it,” Knight says before laughing. “And we were not.”

At 139 minutes, “Wildwood” is uncommonly long for an animated film, let alone a stop-motion animated one. Its staggering production included 136 sets and 231 practical puppets. One character, a golden eagle known as The General, took some 3,000 hours to make.

“These are great acts of care and devotion,” Knight says. “In this modern era where everything is so rapid pace, where entire worlds can be generated with a click of a mouse, the idea of taking your time, and with great devotion and care coaxing life out of something, is very special. I like to call it a quiet act of rebellion.”

Laika isn’t the only big stop-motion company still around. The Bristol, U.K.-based Aardman Animations remains a free-flowing font of pastoral whimsy. (It releases “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” on Sept. 18.) But it’s a precarious business. And it’s easy to wonder if Laika could have kept such long-term productions going without the Knight family wealth.

Focus Features exited its pact with Laika after the release of 2016’s Oscar-nominated “ Kubo and the Two Strings .” Fathom Entertainment, the distributor owned by theater chains, is stepping in to release “Wildwood.” Laika and Fathom have enjoyed unique success in rereleases of “Coraline.” A 2024 rerelease generated an astounding $52.4 million worldwide, fresh evidence of audiences' yearning for something tactile and soulful.

Laika was born in 2003 when Philip Knight acquired Vinton Studios, the company founded by animator Will Vinton. Travis Knight was then an animator there. The name, Laika, comes from the dog launched into space in 1957.

From the start, Knight envisioned an animation studio where darkness and light weren't treated as opposites. Laika has since carved out a sensibility more surreal and more idiosyncratic than the output of animation factories like Pixar or Illumination. “Wildwood,” notably, is rated PG-13.

“When you devote this much of your life to something, you don’t want it to be some candy-colored confection, a bit of pop culture fun,” Knight says. “You want it to be meaningful.”

To a large degree, “Wildwood” is about grief and the heavy cost of carrying it. For Knight, whose older brother, Matthew, died a few years before he encountered Meloy's book, the story is tinged with personal experience.

“You want the stories you tell to be about something. That often involves climbing into the darkened, cobwebbed corners of yourself and pulling those things out,” Knight says. “I did lose my brother. He was too young. A handful of years ago, my wife lost her brother and her nephew. These things are seismic in families. So the movie does wander, sometimes generally and sometimes not, through the corridors of grief.”

That a movie like “Wildwood” is so labored over, Knight believes, gives it its magic. That doesn't mean he doesn't see the inherent absurdity of an arduous process that, he says, moves at the speed of “continental drift.”

“You build thousands of tiny things. You put them under lights. You move them microscopic distances. You take a picture,” says Knight. “And then you repeat that process over and over and over again until you finish the movie or society collapses.”

But as “Wildwood” nears its release, Knight firmly believes it's all worth it — that something in the making of the movie comes across to moviegoers.

“There is a yearning for something that’s handmade, for something that someone has cared into existence,” he says. “It’s always been rare, it’s always been special. But it’s even more so now.”