Wildwood behind the scenes: a VFX "seam team", 97 motion-control rigs, and two years animating one rescue

The A.V. Club published Tara Bennett's behind-the-scenes feature on LAIKA's Wildwood on 24 October 2026. It pairs director and LAIKA CEO Travis Knight with three department heads, who explain how one sequence divides the work between physical and digital craft.

Knight says he approaches the work no differently from live action: performance close to camera is done physically, and visual effects are matched to it so that, in his words, "you can't see the seams between digital and physical." Head of animation Brad Schiff explains why weight comes first: puppets have to be light enough to be tensioned lightly, because dense materials prevent fine movement. He contrasts the face pipeline with Coraline, where single-colour resin prints meant every face was primed, sanded and hand-painted, and one face could take more than a week. On Wildwood, every shot has a bespoke face. On The General, the golden-eagle puppet, the animators control the eyeballs separately from the eyelids, and the VFX team smooths the movement around the eye. Schiff also describes deliberate calibration of secondary motion: the feathers were moved more than real feathers would move, and Prue's ponytail less than real hair would, to balance realism against expressiveness.

Ollie Jones, who leads character and practical effects, says the printed heads still have seams, which a VFX "seam team" blends digitally. Otherwise, the printed material's translucency and the paintwork are what reaches the screen. The General was built from fabric feathers rather than silicone to stay light enough to animate, with gold thread run through the polysatin so she shimmers against the dawn sky.

Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, on his first stop-motion film, describes the process as assembling a mosaic one shot at a time and says he took puppets into the woods to test the look. The article reports that the production used 97 motion-control rigs, programmed by a team of technicians, and that some shots needed two or three stop-motion cameras moved between mounts.

For the second-act sequence in which The General rescues Prue, the article sets out the split. CG supplied the most distant environments, set extensions, the waterfall, river water and cloud augmentation. Production designer Nelson Lowry's crew built sections of riverbed, road and forest for close-ups. The General and Prue are physical puppets, which Knight credits animator Dobrin Yanev with animating frame by frame over two years. Knight adds that no next LAIKA film is yet greenlit. The motion-control and eye-animation facts are folded into the Wiki pages Motion-Control Camera Work in Stop Motion and Puppet eyes and eye animation.