'Wildwood' Is a "Risky" Movie — Just Like 'Coraline' Was 20 Years Ago

Travis Knight recounts the uphill battles to produce the 2009 stop-motion film and his newest epic, Wildwood

What was the last thing you did that took 16 years to accomplish? No shame — but director Travis Knight has a different level of persistence than most of us.

It took Knight and his stop-motion animation studio Laika nearly two decades to bring Wildwood, their latest film, to life. Even then, the studio behind Coraline wasn't entirely prepared for the challenges of its most ambitious movie yet. Knight (who yes, also directed an entire He-Man movie over the course of this journey) says the dark fantasy pushed his team to invent new technologies, rethink old techniques, and take the kinds of risks Hollywood studios tend to avoid.

Polygon spoke with Knight about the long road to Wildwood, the film's surprisingly complicated animated feats, and why he took a unique road to theaters despite years of working with the major studios.

WIldwood is a marvelous film, which took a long time to come together. You acquired the rights in 2010 — what were the bumps in the road?

Sixteen years! Coraline came out in 2009, and at the time it represented a pretty significant seismic shift for what was possible within stop-motion animation. We had so many technological and process advances in making Coraline. And then when I encountered Colin [Meloy]'s book a year later, I completely fell in love with it. It was right up my alley. It felt like it was almost bioengineered in a lab just for me. And yet, at the same time, I recognized I had no idea how we could make it. It was too challenging. It was too ambitious. It was too sweeping in scale. There were so many set pieces, so much world building, so many characters. We had no way of bringing that world to life in the way that the book demanded.

So we took our time, and we developed the tools, the tricks, the technologies, and hopefully improved in our craftsmanship over that period of time. We designed the story, developed the world, the characters, the themes. And then it was seven years ago when I moved the film into pre-production. I felt like finally we were ready to make this movie, and we were absolutely not ready to make this movie because it required us to develop all these new tools and technologies as we were shooting the film. It was by far the most difficult thing that I've ever done. And it's also the thing that I'm most proud of.

What's a specific thing you invented to make this movie?

The list is endless. Take something like the General puppet, which is this giant golden eagle with a five-foot wingspan — a huge puppet. Flight in stop-motion animation is very challenging. A couple of things that are working against you in stop-motion are gravity and inertia. These things have absolutely no life of their own. The only life they have in them is the life that the animator gives to them. And so, in terms of gravity, things want to pull toward the earth, and if something needs to be suspended and fly, you have to figure out how this thing is going to move.

So we developed this technology for this motion base. That technology started on Kubo and the Two Strings, and we developed a new process for that. The way we built the puppet, we usually use silicone to make these puppets because it's the thing that most closely resembles skin. But if we made a silicone general puppet, it would have been so big and so heavy, the animator would not have been strong enough to animate the puppet. So we had to come up with a new way of making the puppet. We essentially made that puppet out of fabric, which is kind of insane when you think about it. And so that's just one example of all the different innovations that the team had to come up with to make this story in the best possible way.

The production is so slick. It's so next level. At this point, do you feel like there needs to be intentionality in reminding the audience that we're watching stop-motion? That what they are seeing isn't computers imitating this art form?

I would say that there's imperfection everywhere because what you're seeing is something that's been crafted by hand. We aim for perfection, but everything is human. We never attain it. That doesn't stop us from trying.

The idea of kind of reminding people of technique I think is antithetical to our storytelling approach, in this medium of animation. We do work in stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, and CG animation and blend these things together, hopefully in an artful way. I do think the act of making art leaves fingerprints on the art itself. I think by virtue of the process of making something, I think it imbues what you're watching with a certain feeling, a certain kind of beauty and charm.

And the way we make films, you experience it in a different way because of how it was made and the artistic choices that were involved in making those decisions. But in the end, it's not about reminding people of technique. Technique is just a way to tell a story. We're trying to tell a story where people engage with these characters, they go on these journeys, hopefully they feel something, they think something, and they come out of the other side of this experience enriched by it. But we do not want people to be thinking about how this was done while they're watching it. We just want them to enjoy the experience of watching the movie.

I will say, at the end of every film we've ever done, we always take a moment where we peel the curtain back for just a moment and show the audience how the magic trick was done. That is purposeful. It's meant, for certain people, to enrich the experience. This whole thing that you just saw, this thing that felt alive and magical, this was all done through hard work and human craftsmanship and human artistry and human effort. I think for some people that makes it more beautiful. It certainly does for me.

After 16 years, you've finally completed this movie — and it's coming out in a slightly nontraditional way. Perhaps fittingly, unlike previous films, a major distributor isn't releasing the movie. It's actually Fathom, which readers may know for hosting event screenings and re-releasing Coraline during the spooky season. Why did you go this route? Were the studios not interested in a PG-13 stop-motion animated fantasy that edges toward more mature entertainment?

I think that we live in an interesting time in cinema. Historically, Hollywood has always been risk-averse, for good reason. I feel great empathy for the people who have to make these decisions. These are hard businesses to run. And you invest a lot of time, a lot of money in making these things and people want to try to mitigate risk. This is a risky movie. Coraline was a risky movie.

Taking the Wayback Machine to 20 years ago when we were trying to find distribution partners for Coraline, people were not banging down our door to make Coraline. In fact, they would tell us why the movie is impossible to make. "You have a girl protagonist, so boys are not gonna see it." "It's scary, so girls are not gonna wanna see it, and parents are not gonna wanna take their kids to it." In fact, one executive said, "This movie is a Roman Polanski art film for kids," which is not the kind of thing you want to put on a poster!

And yet, we kept at it. We believed in what we were doing, so eventually we found a partner who understood what it was that we were trying to do in Focus and Universal at the time. And we got it out to the world. And it's the same thing with Wildwood. It's challenging material. You're not ticking all these boxes, and you can't look at all these comparable movies to say why it's going to succeed, which is something that, for good reason, studios want to make sure they're mitigating their risk.

We had great success working with Fathom in the past, which is our distributor domestically. And the kinds of experiences they create are event cinema, and that's what we felt this movie was. This is a film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, in the biggest rooms possible, with the greatest projection and sound. It needs to be experienced by a group of people, a group of fellow dreamers watching this thing unfold in front of their eyes at the same time. It is an event, I do believe that. This is not something that should be watched on your phone. This is something that should be watched in a beautiful cinema.

Wildwood is out now in theaters.