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Laika’s Ambitious Stop-Motion Fantasy Adaptation Officially Debuts a Jaw-Dropping New Trailer

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Laika hasn’t released a film in theaters in seven years, yet the stop-motion giant has still enjoyed a strong run of late thanks to the legacy of their hand-crafted works. When their dark fantasy masterpiece Coraline returned to theaters in 2024 to celebrate its 15th anniversary, audiences greeted it warmly and powered the film to new heights with another $53 million, a staggering haul for a re-release. Last year, ParaNorman got its time in the spotlight, complete with not just new screenings for Laika’s 20th anniversary, but also a new short reuniting the characters for a fresh spooky adventure. Now, though, the wait is nearly over for their next big project.

Since 2011, the studio has owned the rights to adapt the Colin Meloy-written and Carson Ellis-illustrated children’s fantasy novel Wildwood into a film. 15 years later, the project has blossomed into one of the most painstakingly detailed efforts Laika has undertaken thus far, with CEO and recent Masters of the Universe helmer Travis Knight directing with a script by his regular partner, Chris Butler. The story is a fitting one for the Oregon-based banner, unfolding in Portland where the young Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is sent on a fantastical and treacherous adventure into the enchanted wilderness after her baby brother Mac is kidnapped by crows while they’re out on the town. Accompanied by her classmate Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay), she meets fantastical creatures and fearsome foes alike as she navigates the vibrant realm on the brink of war in hopes of bringing her beloved sibling back.

With two months left until release, Laika has unveiled a new trailer that showcases the stunning stop-motion visuals, while also spotlighting the main villain standing between Prue and her brother, the Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan). It opens on an encounter between the two where Prue asks about the mysterious woman’s son. In a flashback, tragedy unfolds, as a happy memory of Alexandra riding horses with her child is soon swallowed by crows, hinting at a devastating accident that tore her family apart. That moment puts her on the path to stealing Mac away and transforming the Wildwood into a savage place filled with war and death. She’s determined to tear apart the woods to bring back everything she lost, but Prue isn’t one to give up either, making friends with forest dwellers and braving untold danger to save her own family.

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Which Oscar Best Picture
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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

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🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

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What kind of film experience do you actually want?
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The Academy Has Decided
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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.

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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.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘Wildwood’ Fills Out Its Fantasy World With a Massive Cast

Production on Wildwood officially began in 2021, and since then, the film has grown to an epic scale to capture the conflict unfolding within the book’s realm. The trailer further shows off what a massive undertaking of stop-motion this was, with sweeping scenes of armies charging at each other and fluid animation on a level much grander than the studio’s past work. A massive film brings with it a similarly massive cast, too, including an Academy Award winner in Mahershala Ali and an Emmy winner in Angela Bassett, alongside Richard E. Grant, Amandla Stenberg, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Blythe Danner, Tom Waits, and many more.

Wildwood opens in theaters on October 23 through Fathom Entertainment. Check out the new trailer in the player above.


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Release Date

October 23, 2026

Director

Travis Knight

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Writers

Chris Butler, Carson Ellis, Colin Meloy

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Cast

  • Peyton Elizabeth Lee

    Prue McKeel (voice)

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  • Carey Mulligan

    Alexandra (voice)

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