LAIKA's release-week set visit names Wildwood's fabrication crew, puppet mechanisms and a 142,030-face record

A cluster of release-week studio-visit pieces (Animation Scoop's Bill Desowitz, 2026-09-16; The Nerds of Color's Mike Manalo, 2026-09-17, reporting on a July 2026 Hillsboro, Oregon set visit; JoBlo's Steve Seigh, 2026-09-19) names the fabrication and animation crew behind Wildwood's puppet engineering for the first time, following up the open lead from LAIKA's July Annecy exhibition unveiling of The General. Head of character and practical FX Ollie Jones names two internal body mechanisms directly: the Jetpack, "a tool that manipulates characters in tiny increments, invisible to a camera's frame grabbers," and Breathers -- introduced on Missing Link (2019) and used on roughly 90 percent of Wildwood's puppets -- "a key that, when turned, simulates breathing... you can literally see a character's chest expand and contract when you twist the key." The General, the film's golden-eagle character (34in tall, 64in wingspan, 3,794 individually placed feathers), was built as three separate puppets for different flight styles -- motorized shoulders, hand-adjustable mechanical gearing, and a six-axis motion platform with a 10-foot "Octowiddler 2000" gimbal -- with animation supervisor Brad Schiff calling the character's engineering "almost impossible." Director of rapid prototyping Brian McLean reports a new studio record of 142,030 3D-printed replacement faces, and describes building animatable fight-scene biceps out of "horse boning," a hat-making mesh that "expands in the opposite direction" when pushed. Costume designer Deborah Cook and production designer Nelson Lowry also detail dye-sublimation colour-matching across 30-plus duplicate puppet costumes and the recreation of Portland's St. Johns neighbourhood and Forest Park as miniature sets.

For SMDB, these are durable, named-source facts worth keeping past the press cycle: the Jetpack and Breathers mechanisms are new entries in the mechanical-puppet wiki concept (extending the body-mechanism coverage already built around Corpse Bride's clockwork facial gearing), The General's three-puppet rig breakdown replaces the earlier general description on the same page, the 142,030-face total extends the rapid-prototyping-replacement-faces concept's per-film progression past Missing Link's 85,000-90,000, and horse boning joins the improvised- and substitute-materials concept alongside Tyvek, icing sugar and hair gel. Wildwood opens in US theaters on October 23, 2026.

[Update 2026-09-21] In a follow-up from the same studio visit, The Nerds of Color published individual interviews with the five department heads. Head of animation Brad Schiff gave the film's shot count: 2,900 shots against Missing Link's 1,800, with 900 of Wildwood's running a second or less, "shot like a live-action film and edited like a live-action film." A 12-frame shot, he noted, takes as long to set up as a 120-frame one. Rapid prototyping director Brian McLean described his department as building the heads while Character FX builds the bodies, and costume designer Deborah Cook said her Wildwood costume designs were finished back in 2021. The shot-count point is folded into the Wiki's shot-tracking and production-management page.

[Update 2026-10-23] The Catalan newspaper ARA (Marc Tió, published 21 October 2026, from a summer visit to LAIKA's Portland-area studio) adds four details not in the earlier visit reports. Stages are identified by colour names (blue, green, black, then blue 2, green 2, black 2, plus salmon and turquoise) so animators can find their way around the floor. The replica of Portland's Pittock Mansion is close to four metres high and, at nearly 40 square metres, is the film's largest interior set. Costume designer Deb Cook explains that Prue's blue coat and the McKeel family's knitwear were embroidered rather than hand-knitted because many identical duplicates were needed; made by hand with needles, she says, two identical pieces would be difficult. Head of animation Brad Schiff describes the third-act action sequence, almost 12 minutes long and 411 shots, as one in which "we had practical puppets that interacted with digital puppets"; rehearsals used provisional elements so the digital artists knew where characters would be hit. These points are folded into the Wiki's miniature-costume, animation-stage and digital-extension pages.