‘The stupidest way to make a movie’: Travis Knight on Wildwood

Travis Knight had recently scored a hit as the lead animator on Coraline, the Oscar-nominated film from 2009, when he read the still unpublished manuscript for Wildwood, a dark fantasy novel that follows a teenage girl who stumbles into an enchanted forest just outside Knight’s home city of Portland, Oregon.

A decade and a half later, Knight − who’s also the head of the Laika animation studio, and since Coraline was made has directed Kubo and the Two Strings and Bumblebee − has finally brought the story to the big screen.

It has been a busy year. Following his improbably hilarious Masters of the Universe, Wildwood is Knight’s second feature of 2026. Only weeks before its release, he’s still beavering away on post-production in London.

“I’ve been working on Wildwood for most of my career,” he says. “It’s just a crazy whim of the universe that things happen. It was not easy to do both these things at the same time, but I’m proud of both films. By the way, it’s not something I recommend to anyone.”

Brought to the big screen? Perhaps more accurately, Knight has brought Wildwood to life. Since 2005, Laika, an independent operation that specialises in stop-motion, has reinvigorated a cinematic technique that dates back to 1898. For Missing Link, its lovable Victorian misadventure from 2019, Laika’s five 3D printers produced more than 100,000 interchangeable facial pieces, often running around the clock. For Wildwood, the studio had to wait for the technology to catch up.

“The things we use to tell our stories don’t know they’re alive,” Knight says of the 136 sets and 231 practical puppets used in the making of his new film. “Metal, wood, fabric, silicone: left to their own devices, these things would happily sit on a tabletop, quietly doing nothing.

“An artist has to persuade them otherwise. You’re looking at something that’s inert, and with an adjustment of the eyes, a sagging of the shoulders or the reaching of a hand, you suddenly stop seeing what’s in front of you as an object and start seeing it as a person.

“To me that’s magic. Somebody takes a bit of their own life and puts it into something that has never lived. Someone thousands of miles away watches it in the dark and recognises the humanity there. That’s why I’m such a huge champion of this medium.”

In common with Laika itself, Wildwood is a proud product of Portland, the perfect quirky hometown for the film’s McKeel family, overprotective hippie parents who live with their preteen daughter, Prue, and her baby brother, Mac.

With a nod to Labyrinth, a babysitting stint goes horribly wrong when a murder of crows snatches Mac from a playground and brings the toddler deep into the nearby forest.

Joined by her awkward classmate Curtis, Prue ventures into that forbidden Wildwood only to find a fantastical netherworld of talking animals, powerful sorceresses, warring factions and grief, where a ruthless dowager governess, Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan, leading an A-list voice cast that includes Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett and Tom Waits), commands her army of mangy coyotes to annex kingdom after kingdom.

“I fell in love with this story immediately,” Knight says. “It felt like it breathed the same air as the kind of fantasies and fairy tales I loved growing up, things like Tolkien, Baum and CS Lewis. But it had its own unique flavour.

The original book was written by Colin Meloy, of the US indie band The Decemberists, and illustrated by Carson Ellis.

“Colin is an extraordinary artist. He set it in Portland, which is where I’m from, of course. Underneath that, it felt like an opportunity to tell a big, sweeping, fantastic story, but it also had an emotional core, a very primal drive at the centre, which I thought was pretty profound.”

The ambition of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy noted, few films since Hollywood’s golden age of biblical blockbusters and swords and sandals have attempted to stage battle scenes as ambitious as the denouement of Wildwood.

Caleb Deschanel, the veteran cinematographer behind Being There and The Passion of the Christ, swoops his camera through rushing troops as opposing tribes and magical animals clash violently. The breathtaking composition and movement would be almost impossible to recreate in live action.

“I deeply love animation,” Knight says. “One of the things we set out to do with this movie is to show that animation can be used to tell incredible, big, epic and emotional stories in ways that people don’t typically think of in this medium. It’s not easy to do that, particularly in stop-motion. It’s challenging. It’s also really rewarding when it works.”

It’s not just the technical requirements. In Kubo and the Two Strings, his directorial debut, the film-maker – who is the son of Phil Knight, one of the founders of Nike, and his wife, Penny – explored animation with an emotional depth that has more in common with the indie stylings of Don Hertzfeldt or Nina Paley than with conventional studio animation.

The emotionally impactful Kubo was shaped by the death of Knight’s older brother, Matthew, in a scuba-diving accident in El Salvador in 2004, when he was 33.

Wildwood revisits the grief of its predecessor.

“There’s more of my own life in this film than anything I’ve ever done,” Knight says. “Making this movie, you end up sharing so much of your life with someone else, revealing so much about yourself.

“Some people I’ve worked with on this movie know things about me that hardly anyone else knows. That stuff makes its way into the movie.

“It can be fatiguing to live in that space for a long period. But I am at the end of this 16-year-long journey. We did a soundcheck just the other day in Dolby Atmos. I’ve seen the movie a million times. I know every single frame, every line of dialogue. Yet I sit there and watch it with fresh eyes, and it moves me.”

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The film’s soulfulness manifests in its bemused and playful version of Portland, featuring such Portlandia-friendly establishments as Dripsters coffee emporium, and populated by oddballs likely to dress up as Darth Vader for a spin of their gyroscope.

Wildwood’s characters are equally drawn from life. Prue, the film’s heroine, looks rather like Maryse Knight, Travis’s Irish wife. (She was born in Portlaoise.)

“That’s funny,” he says. “Other people have said that Alexandra reminds them of Maryse. My Irish nephew is definitely the spitting image of Curtis. I love that these things find their way into your work, maybe without you even being aware of it.”

The daringness of Wildwood seems at odds with the rest of the industry. The homogenisation of contemporary animation is reflected in the box office. All four of the highest-grossing animated films worldwide – Ne Zha 2, Zootopia 2, Inside Out 2 and Frozen 2 – are sequels, highlighting studios’ increasing reliance on established franchises over original stories.

Laika (which is owned by Knight’s father) has never made a sequel. It’s not working to algorithms, the film-maker says.

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“We live in an era that’s designed to be frictionless, where the world is increasingly designed to remove the effort and care that actually go into making something meaningful,” he says.

“Take artificial intelligence. You can create an entire world with nothing but a prompt. What we do at Laika really requires time, effort and care. The making of this film is a quiet act of rebellion, because it feels like a celebration and a triumph of artistry.

“There’s a human, an artist, behind every choice. It’s definitely not the easiest way to make a movie. In fact it’s the stupidest, hardest way, and the most painful way. But I think it gives the final film a soul.”

On that note, does Knight the chief executive ever clash with Knight the animator and director?

“I’d like to think that CEO Travis always lives somewhere in the brain of Director Travis. He’s saying: ‘Okay, look, we have to be responsible about some of the things we’re doing.’ I always make sure the work is approached in a really methodical and thoughtful way. We’re not playing jazz with the movie. We storyboarded this thing within an inch of its life over the years. All the money’s on the screen.”

He laughs.

“But I only feel like I’m on the right track if it scares me.”

Wildwood is in cinemas from Friday, October 23rd