"Wildwood's Full Trailer Shows Why Stop-Motion Still Feels Like Magic"

Laika Studios has released the full trailer for Wildwood, director Travis Knight's upcoming stop-motion fantasy, and it's a reminder that hand-crafted animation can still stop a scroll. The film adapts the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy — frontman of The Decemberists — and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. Set against a haunting cover of Avicii's "Wake Me Up," the footage leans into the same painterly, tactile quality that has made Laika's work instantly recognizable since Coraline.

What makes Laika's approach especially interesting is the technology hiding inside all that handcrafted warmth. Since ParaNorman, the studio has been a pioneer of 3D-printed "replacement faces": each character's head is printed with thousands of subtly different facial expressions that animators swap frame by frame. It's a quiet revolution — traditional stop-motion puppets once had a handful of fixed faces, but this hybrid pipeline gives Laika's performers a range of micro-expressions that feels closer to live-action acting while keeping the unmistakable texture of physical materials. That's why even a two-second glance in a trailer can carry so much emotion.

The craft also comes at a pace that is almost hard to comprehend in an era of instant content. Stop-motion runs at 24 frames per second, and every one of those frames is a real object nudged by a real hand. A skilled animator might produce only a few seconds of finished footage in a full week. Wildwood has reportedly been in production for years, which makes the 90-million-view teaser from May feel less like hype and more like an audience recognizing how much labor went into every frame.

The Oregon connection is a nice touch too. Laika is based in Hillsboro, and Meloy and Ellis are longtime Portland fixtures, so the film is very much a homegrown Pacific Northwest collaboration. For anyone curious about the craftsmanship behind the trailer, Laika's official site offers a look at their filmography and process, and the studio's partnership with 3D-printing company Stratasys has been well documented as the engine behind those expressive faces.

Wildwood arrives with the kind of patient, analog soul that increasingly feels rare — a film built one frame at a time, in a studio still betting that audiences will feel the difference.