Wildwood (BFI London Film Festival 2026)

I think I’ve had several different introductions to this review floating around in my head for two or three years now. It’s been so long since Laika announced Wildwood as their next animated project after Missing Link, a film that unfortunately severely underperformed at the box office, and for a good while there was a dearth of information as Laika pivoted to announcing live-action projects instead. I’m all for them expanding their repertoire, but it had me questioning if the studio was phasing out stop-motion.

Wildwood answers that question with a resounding and definitive ‘no,’ something which we’ll get to, but there is no denying that Wildwood comes at one hell of a precarious time. It would be easy for me to go on a ramble about my love for Laika (a love which is well-documented on the site to say the very least) and how much I was anticipating their comeback, but it’s more interesting to look at it objectively and, on that level, things have been uncertain for a while, and might well still be.

An original film nowadays, especially an animated one, can either do amazingly well like K-Pop Demon Hunters, or fall flat like most of Pixar’s original output so far this decade. It would be entirely understandable for Laika to want to dial back, and make an achievable small-scale feature just in case the same thing that happened to them last time happened again. Again, they have put up a gigantic middle finger to any thought of that.

Wildwood is not only easily the biggest thing Laika has ever done, it’s probably the biggest thing ever done in stop-motion. At 132 minutes, this is the longest stop-motion film of all time and one of the longest Western animated films in general, and the 12A rating is probably the single ballsiest age classification you can get in animation. You’re not exactly Sausage Party, but you’re purposefully avoiding your film ever being seen as ‘just for kids.’ That argument has always been bollocks, but still, when you’re being released in the calendar year when the biggest animated film is Toy Story 5 and Andy Serkis turned Orwell’s Communist allegory into a talking-animals picture made by a ‘faith-based’ studio, being an animated film over two hours and for kids that have left primary school is far more of a statement than it is a simple fact. And here’s another statement: God it is good.

For their first film in nearly a decade, Laika has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at an adaptation of the book series by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis that starts on a massive scale and somehow keeps one-upping itself. It may be their first film set in the modern day since ParaNorman (I feel so old), but Wildwood is rightfully more interested in its extravagant fantastical world, the Impassable Wilderness, and what a world they have crafted. The Other World from Coraline showed us that Laika can craft an environment with grandeur and danger, but Wildwood magnifies those qualities tenfold; everything crafted here seems like it was made as a result of a dare that it wasn’t possible, and that’s especially true when we get to the third act. 

Before I get ahead of myself though, none of this artistic wizardry would mean as much if there wasn’t a good story to be told by it. This could be a point of contention, as Wildwood is made up of story elements we have seen before. There’s the obvious comparison to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, with an older sister finding her baby brother who has been abducted by an evil villain, but I also got a lot of Ron Howard’s Willow – both are positive comparisons, but there will be some who argue that the plot doesn’t tread new ground. But does it really have to? Coraline is essentially a Hansel and Gretel story, and The Boxtrolls takes a lot of elements from Tarzan. Laika has done this sort of thing before to great effect: why shouldn’t Wildwood? Travis Knight even said before the screening that the film is about how far you would go for love, and this can be seen in many different ways in the film. That’s hardly a new message in cinema, but when it’s done with this much gusto and scale, you can’t moan too much.

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The main thing Wildwood called to mind for me was a huge fantasy blockbuster. Not just the aforementioned Willow and Labyrinth, but box-office smashes from the 2000s like Lord of The Rings or Pirates of the Caribbean, and it seems like a completely bonkers attempt to replicate the scale and the scope of those films but in clay. And on that level, my God. Wildwood may start on a similar note to Labyrinth, with a murder of crows kidnapping an infant in a really arresting visual, but the canvas opens up massively once we enter the forest and Laika lets their creativity run wild. A chase scene with coyotes, a hotel populated by a whole host of anthropomorphic creatures, talking owls living in treetops: no stone is left unturned in Wildwood, and each part of the world feels like a real place.  

And that third act? 

Travis Knight said that the whole development process for Wildwood took 16 years, from the original book manuscript being given to him to the end product. I’m amazed it didn’t take 16 years just to craft and render everything that takes place during that last 45 minutes. That third act will go down in history as one of the most bonkers achievements in the history of animation, and to say it’s a super-impressive feat for stop-motion would be doing it the biggest disservice. Its scale has never been reached in stop-motion before, and I have no idea if it ever will again.

I have only a couple of small issues with the film based on this one viewing. While I think it’s runtime was well-deserved given how much the film has to do, there is a bit of a lull in the middle and we stay in that lull for a scene or two too long. Also, and this could possibly be a case of ‘first-viewing syndrome,’ the sheer abundance of characters can get a little overwhelming for the story they’re trying to tell. But when I say that this is a case of first-viewing syndrome, I have every intention of watching this again when it comes out next week. Free from the endless hustle and bustle of LFF, I’m sure the film will be able to sing more as a film and not this all-encompassing important piece of animation that it was sold as during the premiere.

I can’t stress this enough though – this is an important piece of animation. This is a gigantic and ambitious narrative and technical swing, taking a large-scale fantasy narrative that would be a gamble for most live-action studios and crafting the entire thing in clay. Wildwood is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and Laika have more than earned their status in animation history with it. But beyond its sheer existence, it’s an investing, exciting, funny, scary and heartfelt ride, an original fantasy blockbuster that will command the audience it gets. There’s been doom and gloom reported for the film’s projected opening weekend, and maybe Laika films are just bound to not be a slam-dunk at the box office, but much like with their filmography, those who love this will adore it, and I’m sure it will make many a Laika fan. 

Laika have other stop-motion projects in the pipeline after this: Piranesi and The Night Gardener are just two of the ones that have been announced. There was even talks of another Henry Selick-directed adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novel, but due to – you know – that, it’s been put on the backburner (cheers Neil). While I doubt the studio will ever be releasing stop-motion features at the same rate they were in the 2010s, if they’re just a fraction as ambitious as Wildwood, I don’t mind waiting. Right now, Wildwood may be Laika’s most important film since Coraline, and that’s really, really saying something. 

ALEX’S ARCHIVE – WILDWOOD