‘Wildwood’ Director Travis Knight on How Live-Action Filmmaking Shaped His Stop-Motion Animated Adventure

Many scenes in “Wildwood” are designed to look spectacular. Even if each frame weren’t already rendered with the meticulous detail and artistry of stop-motion animation, the Laika Studios film is full of complex, chaotic battle sequences, a forest writhing with eldritch magic, and giant eagles soaring through the sky.

But some of the most technically challenging scenes, according to director Travis Knight, aren’t the ones that look the most majestic. They are — true to the spirit of the film and the lesson learned by its stubborn, caring protagonist Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) — the simple magic of everyday life.

In fact, Knight told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that one of the most challenging sequences in “Wildwood” was simply getting its hero from one end of her bedroom to the other. Laika prefers Canon cameras mounted on large motion-control rigs, which offer the flexibility needed to capture puppet movements adjusted one frame at a time. But when the camera moves, it also has to do so one painstaking frame at a time.

Knight, who’s now directed live-action features “Bumblebee” and “Masters of the Universe” in addition to his Laika work on “Kubo and the Two Strings,” wanted “Wildwood” to have the same camera language as a live-action film. He wanted the intimacy and wordless visual storytelling of a camera tracking Prue as she huffs across her bedroom, where the camera movement helps us see the decor shift from the artifacts of a carefree kid to those of a more disaffected teen.

“I still wanted it to feel like it was shot like a live-action film, with that kind of intimacy with the camera. But a camera on a motion-control rig is the size of a Ford F-150 in our [puppet-scale] world. It’s huge. And so if a camera is moving, you have to create space for the camera on set,” Knight said.

This is on top of creating space for the animator, who is roughly the size of a Kaiju in comparison to the fifth-scale the humans on either side of the Impassable Wood live at. The Prue puppet is roughly 10 inches tall. Being able to move that puppet and a camera at least as large as her bedroom that the puppet is moving through? That is a particularly gnarly feat of physics.

“We essentially had to deconstruct the set,” Knight said. “It was almost like it was a clamshell. It would open to make room for the camera, and then it would close up again. It was such a complicated engineering feat, when all it is [for] is a camera panning across a room. Those are the kinds of challenges that the team has to figure out, which is stupid, but it’s what it requires if you’re trying to tell a story like this.”

‘Wildwood’ Courtesy Everett Collection

There is much to be said, and rightly, about the awe-inducing moments of spectacle in “Wildwood.” The Laika team had to figure out how to make giant puppets out of fabric and feathers instead of standard-issue silicone to simulate flight compellingly, accurately, and tactilely. Combat sequences required enormous attention to detail. But when Knight watches the film, he’s just as struck by the invisible work that makes “Wildwood” feel like a live-action epic — the thankless but involving work that viewers aren’t ever meant to see.

“I learned a great many things about what to do, what not to do [working in live-action]. It fundamentally changed my relationship with the camera, which is one of the reasons why ‘Wildwood’ looks so different. It’s because I wanted it to feel as if it were without the inherent limitations you would typically find in stop-motion cinematography,” Knight said. “When I see this movie, I am seeing all these little miraculous moments of engineering and artistry and human creativity at play on the big screen, and that’s one of the reasons it moves me so much.”

“Wildwood” is now playing in theaters.