Laika Boss Travis Knight Ramps Up ‘Wildwood’ Campaign In Annecy

Laika President and CEO Travis Knight touched down at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival last week for a special presentation of ambitious upcoming stop-motion opus Wildwood.

Strangely, given the mark Laika has made on stop-motion animation with Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and Missing Link (2019), it was the first time Knight had made it to festival.

He was in good company with other guests including Brad Bird, Peter Lord, the Quay Brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, Ricky Gervais, Pierre Coffin and Chris Meladandri among many more.

Knight’s trip came as Laika ramps up its campaign for the fall release of Wildwood, its most ambitious production to date.

Arriving in Annecy, as France experienced one of the hottest weeks in recorded history, Knight praised the fairytale look of its old town; the stunning lake, majestic mountains backdrop and pure air but said he was not made for the heat.

“It’s also currently hotter than the surface of Mercury. I’m not built for this. To understand the scale of the problem, you first need to understand my relationship with sunlight. I don’t have one,” he joked.

“I’m an animator, which basically means I spent the last 25 years of my life in a dark cave, occasionally emerging for provisions. I have the complexion of a sickly Victorian child who works in a coal mine.”

He kicked off the presentation with a screening of the Wildwood trailer. First launched with an event in Cannes, it has been available online for some six weeks but seeing it on the big screen made for a spine-tingling experience.

Based on the first novel in the Wildwood Chronicles written by The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, with illustrations by his wife Carson Ellis, the film follows the adventures of seventh grader Prue McKeel when she enters a forbidden magical forest with schoolmate Curtis in pursuit of a murder of crows who have swooped off with her baby brother Mac. The youngsters are voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Room-breakout Jacob Trembley.

“It’s a fantastic book series. I got a first glimpse well before Colin was even finished writing. It was a long time ago. We had just come out with Coraline. I started talking to Colin about doing an adaptation,” said Knight.

“I’m a huge fantasy nerd… I read The Lord of Rings when I was a child and loved it. This story felt like it breathed that same air, but it was very specific to because it was set in Portland, where I’m from, and it reimagined Portland as this sort of fantasy realm. It’s also very emotional at the core.  It felt like the perfect combination of a big fantasy epic and something that was very intimate.”

In an indication of how long it has taken Laika to bring the project to fruition, Knight recalled a conversation with Meloy.

“He said, ‘I just have one request that please let’s not have the movie come out before the books.’ That was 16 years ago. I said, ‘Colin, you don’t need to worry about that. Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. It’s like continental drift.”

Knight treated the enthusiastic Annecy crowd to a look at the entire opening act of the film, introducing Prue Mckeel and her family in Portland as well as the events leading up to the fateful kidnapping of her brother.

There were also sneak peeks at a scene in which Curtis wakes up to find himself a prisoner of the Coyote Army, led by Dowager Governess Alexandra, voiced by Carey Mulligan, as well as a breathtaking chase sequence in which Prue flees the crows on the back of The General, a fearless golden eagle voiced by Angela Bassett.

Knight proclaimed the new production Laika’s biggest and most ambitious to date. Quoting longtime creative partner Chris Butler, who wrote the Wildwood screenplay adaptation, he explained it was of part of the company’s evolution.

“He said, ‘Coraline takes place in a house; ParaNorman, in a town; The Boxtrolls, in a city; Kubo, in a country, Missing Link in the world, and Wildworld takes place over multiple worlds,” he recounted.

“It just keeps getting bigger…I dipped my toe in it with Kubo. At that time, Kubo was the most expansive thing that we’d ever done, and I did want to do that… this sort of Kurosawan myth in miniature, a sort of David Lean style film shot on a tabletop. This [Wildwood]was kind of taking that and amplifying it.”

Knight added that one of the reasons Wildwood had taken so long to bring to fruition was due to the  time it had taken to develop tools and techniques in-house to produce a film on this scale.

“It’s by far the biggest and most ambitious thing we’ve ever done When I finally felt like we were ready after five movies,  the universe said, ‘ha, good luck buddy, you are going to suffer beautifully for this choice’. But I’m so incredibly proud of the movie. The crew at Laika, they put everything that they have in the movie and it’s not done yet,” he said.

Going into the production process, Knight said that while the film is essentially a stop-motion production, it also uses digital technology.

“People often comment on the stop-motion nature of what we do, but we do use computers… we’re not Amish… a combination of art and craft and technology, that’s how we make these things and that’s always been at the core of what we’ve done and a founding element of how Laika started,” he said.

“Back when I was a stop-motion animator, the writing was on the wall… with the ascendancy of the computer… the computer could do everything we could do, but better and faster and cheaper… the theory I had was essentially what if we took those things and blended them together. What if we were essentially like Luddites who embraced the loom, took the author of our demise and essentially wrapped our arms around it and figured out how we could live together?,” he continued.

“As we’re seeing now, we can create entire worlds with the click of a mouse, or you can generate video with just a prompt… the act of making a stop-motion film kind of feels like a quiet act of rebellion.”

Knight added that this approach sees Laika bring together craftspeople, artists and NASA-grade technologists under one roof, alongside award-winning cinema professionals, such as multi-Oscar-nominated  Wildwood director of photography Caleb Deschanel.

He emphasized, however, that stop-motion remains at the heart of the process for Laika’s films.

“I love all forms of filmmaking, all forms of animation but there’s something very, very specific, special and unique about stop-motion… it’s essentially brought to life by an animator’s hands. It’s progressive, it’s not iterative like other forms of animation. You can’t go back and change things. Every shot is essentially a performance from beginning to end in slow motion.

“There’s something inherent, you know, in the process of creating art. It leaves a trace of the process in the art itself. Embedded in every single frame of a stop-motion movie, including this one, is the humanity of the people who brought it to life.”

As well as the presentation by Knight Laika was also present with exhibition “Wildwood: A First Glimpse into a Handmade World”. Going behind the scenes of the picture, it is one of the inaugural exhibitions of Annecy’s new International Center for Animated Film (Cité Internationale du Cinéma d’Animation).

Shipped over from Laika Studios’ HQ in Portland, Oregon, exhibits include a miniature replica of Pittock Mansion, one of the story’s main locations; a dozen individually crafted trees and the puppet for The General.

One of the largest puppets ever created by Laika, it measures 34 inches (86 cm) from beak to tail with a 64-inch (106cm) wingspan, features 3,794 individually placed features and took 3,000 hours to make.

“It’s one of the most complicated puppets we’ve ever built and a thing of beauty, a work of art. Birds are essentially shape shifters from the outstretched wings to kind of the folded up. They go through such huge transformation to figure out how to physically do that with puppet is really, really hard,’’ said Knight.

“Then you take that into consideration that with every single frame, the animator has to move the feathers, the hair, the cloth… This guy Dobrin [Yanev] animated pretty much the whole thing. I worried for his mental health but he absolutely loved this bird.”

Ahead of his presentation, Knight was also presented with one of the first plaques destined for the new animation center’s Wall of Fame. Inspired by the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, the plaques feature imprints of the hands of the recipients. He joins inaugural honorees Chris Meledandri, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson, Pierre Coffin and Didier Brunner.

“This is actually very special for me. These hands have bled for the stuff you guys see on screen. Seriously, I’ve cut myself so many times on x acto blades. It’s a real thrill,” said Knight.

Wildwood is due to open in theaters in the U.S. on October 23 with Fathom Entertainment handling the release. Annecy’s Wildwood exhibition runs until September 27.