At VIEW Conference, LAIKA's Steve Emerson puts Wildwood at 2,776 shots, with one shot needing 1,124 faces

LAIKA production VFX supervisor Steve Emerson presented Wildwood at VIEW Conference 2026 in Turin (12-16 October), and Cartoon Brew's Jamie Lang reported the talk on 14 October. Emerson, on his sixth LAIKA feature, said he joined the film in February 2020, and that it took 265 weeks from the start of stage animation to final VFX delivery. The headline number is the shot count. Missing Link (2019), the studio's previous record holder, had 1,486 shots; Wildwood has 2,776. One shot alone needed 1,124 individual facial replacements, which Emerson called a stop-motion record. The production figures he gave were 223 handcrafted puppets, 132 practical sets and 728 handmade trees across 10 Pacific Northwest species, with more than 142,000 replacement faces in all.

Two working methods from the talk are worth keeping beyond the press cycle. First, crowded shots are rehearsed and blocked with all the puppets together, but the final performances are then split out and shot separately, so each animator works one puppet at a time without the others in the way; the passes are composited afterwards. Second, the film's living ivy was not driven mainly by the usual software simulation. Its movement was developed from stop-motion tests and from footage of wires being pulled out of miniature trees, filmed at 240 frames per second and played backward, so a simple physical pull became growth and wrapping. Emerson's point, as reported, was that digital work on a LAIKA film has to answer to the handmade look rather than replace it.

A note on the numbers. LAIKA's release-week set-visit coverage in September gave 231 puppets and 136 sets, and head of animation Brad Schiff gave 2,900 shots against Missing Link's 1,800. The sources do not say what each count includes (hero puppets versus duplicates, sets versus set pieces, cut versus delivered shots), so SMDB records both rather than choosing one. Every measure agrees on the scale: Wildwood is LAIKA's biggest production by a wide margin. The two methods are folded into the Wiki at Rehearsal and blocking and Shooting in reverse.