Brad Schiff on Wildwood: a year for the first puppet, 36 Prues in all

LAIKA head of animation Brad Schiff told Exclaim!'s Rachel Ho at the Toronto International Film Festival that stop motion is "a crazy way to make a film": every object in *Wildwood* is handmade, and each one passes through several departments before an animator can touch it.

Schiff traces a character from concept art to a 2D drawing, then clay and digital sculpts, moulds, an armature (the puppet's skeleton) and a silicone body. He estimates the first puppet for a character takes about a year. Later duplicates come faster, and the production built 36 Prue puppets and 30 Curtis puppets for its two young leads. Costumes are engineered to be animated, with wiring and foil so animators can pose them, because, as Schiff points out, stop motion has no simulation: animators move every element by hand.

Jacob Tremblay, who voices Curtis, recorded his dialogue in 2021 in isolation under lockdown rules. He says he only grasped how much craft went into the puppets during the press tour. The film took six years to make; LAIKA acquired the rights to Colin Meloy's novel in 2011. Schiff admits that keeping morale up over that span is hard, but says that solving each shot's problems kept the work fresh.

The duplicate counts and the one-year estimate are now part of the Wiki page on duplicate puppets and asset replication for parallel stages.