Travis Knight Wanted WILDWOOD to Be a Stop-Motion LORD OF THE RINGS

DirectorTravis Knighthad some pretty epic ambitions for Laika's new stop-motion fantasy adventure Wildwood. He wanted to make something on the scale of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, complete with massive battles, incredible creatures, and the kind of cinematic spectacle you wouldn't expect from a stop-motion animated movie.

That's a massive challenge, but it's also the kind of thing that makes Laika's films so awesome. During an interview with /Film, Knight revealed that Jackson's legendary fantasy trilogy was a major inspiration for Wildwood.

In fact, when he first approached his creative partner Chris Butler about the project, he had a pretty simple way of describing what he wanted to accomplish.

Knight explained: “No question about it. I mean, look, Tolkien is a figure that looms large in my imagination. I've loved his stories since I was a kid. I could not believe what Peter Jackson and his team accomplished with The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“It's one of the most astonishing feats of cinema ever. It was a huge inspiration for us on this movie. I remember in a reductive way, I said to Chris Butler, my creative partner on the movie — he was the first person I brought on — saying, ‘Okay, I want to make a stop motion Lord of the Rings.’ So that was absolutely something we thought about.”

Knight wanted Wildwood to feel like a live-action fantasy epic rather than a traditional stop-motion production. That was especially important when it came to the film's massive final battle, which required Laika to combine several different filmmaking techniques.

He continued: “So knowing that we wanted to pull no punches when we got to the end, we really thought about how could we shoot this cinematically? How can we cut this in a way where it feels like a big live-action epic? It does not feel like it was shot on a tabletop with a bunch of miniatures. And that was a tricky thing to figure out, but it is a combination of things.”

The sequence combines full-scale sets, miniatures, physical puppets, digital puppets, and extensive visual effects. It's all these incredible art forms that are commingling in a way that hopefully is seamless and creates a really immersive and exhilarating and hopefully terrifying experience for the audience.

It's pretty cool to hear Knight talk about bringing that kind of scale to stop-motion animation. Laika already showed what it could accomplish with Kubo and the Two Strings, but Wildwood takes things even further with its ambitious fantasy world and large-scale action sequences.

The film follows a young girl who ventures into a magical wilderness to rescue her kidnapped younger brother, setting off an adventure filled with strange creatures, dangerous encounters, and warring factions.

What I like about Knight's approach is that he isn't trying to make Wildwood look like another animated movie. He wants audiences to experience the scope and intensity of a live-action fantasy epic while keeping the handcrafted artistry that makes Laika's work so special.

If the studio can capture even a fraction of the magic and spectacle of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy through stop-motion animation, we're in for something pretty damn cool.