The beloved stop-motion animation studio Laika is now firmly in its second decade of operation, though it’s been a while since it made its presence known in theaters. The last film under its banner, Missing Link, was released over seven years ago to widespread critical acclaim, but failed to make a splash at the box office and has since been mostly forgotten compared to other enduring favorites like Coraline and ParaNorman. Their greatest successes of late have come from re-releases, with Coraline in particular crossing multiple new box-office milestones in 2024 after Henry Selick‘s haunting cult classic returned to the big screen. This year, though, Laika is making a comeback with an adaptation they’ve been eyeing since 2011.
Based on the children’s fantasy novel of the same name, penned by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis, Wildwood is billed as a sprawling woodland journey that will follow teenager Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) in a desperate race to save her baby brother. Accompanied by her ever-loyal classmate, Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay), she ventures beyond the bounds of Portland, Oregon, into an enchanted forest known as the Impassable Wilderness. What she finds is a whole separate world that is startlingly alive with animals, bandits, and power-driven figures in the middle of a fateful conflict threatening the entire balance of power. It’s been teased as Laika’s most ambitious, large-scale project to date, and now, the first teaser trailer has been unveiled, pulling back the curtain on a gorgeously hand-crafted project.
Before delving into the fantastical side of things, the footage first offers a glimpse at Prue’s colorful family life. Her parents are on the stricter side, dead set against the idea of letting their young son outside. Sure enough, though, the first chance she gets, Prue puts him up in a wagon, gets her bike, and pulls him around town to show him the wonders of the outside world. Every frame is popping with eye-catching color and life, making the city feel alive and showing the vibrant bond between the brother and sister, though it’s contrasted with a much gloomier scene of a boy stepping up to a ledge as his panicked mother rushes in. Light and dark collide as Prue’s baby brother is carried away by crows, and she and Curtis begin their journey into the Wildwood, where humans and animals co-exist, and war and danger await around every corner. It’s an emotional, creative, and adventurous preview of what looks to be a return to form for the vaunted studio.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
‘Wildwood’ Brings a Star-Studded Voice Cast Into the Woods
Laika CEO and Bumblebee director Travis Knight helmed Wildwood, in a return behind the camera at the studio after spearheading their 2016 feature, Kubo and the Two Strings. Missing Link writer-director Chris Butler also reunited with him to pen the screenplay. Filling out this fantastical world is an eye-watering cast of award-worthy talent around Lee and Tremblay, including Carey Mulligan, Richard E. Grant, Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Tom Waits, Charlie Day, Blythe Danner, Arthur Knight, Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson, Tantoo Cardinal, Rob Delaney, Jemaine Clement, Marc Evan Jackson, Len Cariou, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Angela Bassett, and Mahershala Ali.
Wildwood finally takes flight in the U.S. on October 23, courtesy of Fathom Entertainment. Check out the teaser trailer in the player above.
