Travis Knight on Wildwood's fabric-built General and the muscles LAIKA put inside its human puppets

In a release-week interview with /Film's Ben Pearson (October 22, 2026), Wildwood director Travis Knight explains two puppet-building decisions that earlier coverage of the film had not recorded. The first concerns The General, the giant golden eagle. LAIKA usually skins its puppets in silicone, which Knight calls "the material that most closely resembles human skin", but a silicone General "would've been too heavy" for an animator to move, so the puppet is "almost entirely made out of fabric". Its neck is not a conventional jointed mechanism either: Knight compares it to a Slinky, a coiled structure that can be bent along its whole length, because birds, as he puts it, are shape-shifters.

The second concerns the human characters. Knight says he asked Ollie Jones, whom he credits as LAIKA's head of puppets, whether muscles could be built into the puppets so the characters would feel fully alive. Jones devised a way to put muscles inside a puppet, so that when a character bends an arm to strike another character, the muscles visibly bulge. Knight also describes the film's climactic battle as a mix of full-scale sets, miniatures, physical puppets, visual effects and digital puppets, staged to read like a live-action epic rather than a tabletop shoot, and he frames the computer as one more tool alongside the studio's hand craft, with each LAIKA feature since Coraline adding techniques the next could draw on.

These facts complement the mechanisms already documented for The General (motorized and geared wing rigs, a six-axis motion platform, breathing mechanisms and 3,794 silk feathers). They are folded into the Wiki pages on Skin materials, where weight can override likeness when choosing the outer material, and Mechanical puppet, where internal musculature extends body-level mechanisms beyond the face.