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Of all the mediums to make a film, stop-motion may be the most time-consuming. Just take a look at the films of Laika Studios, the company behind “Coraline,” “Paranorman,” and “Kubo and the Two Strings.” Most of their films take around five years to produce, and their latest “Wildwood” is no exception, beginning production in 2021 and finally seeing release this fall. Now, IndieWire can exclusively share the poster for the studio’s first new film since 2019, which features an eye-catching image of the main character Prue and the film’s mysterious main antagonist, Alexandria.
Based on the novel of the same name by The Decemberists singer Colin Meloy and featuring illustrations by his wife Carson Ellis, “Wildwood” is set in Portland, Oregon, and focuses on Prue, a teenage girl whose infant brother is unexpectedly kidnapped by a flock of crows controlled by Alexandria. Venturing into the forest with her friend Curtis, Prue stumbles upon a mystical world of humans and talking animals, and must embark on a dangerous adventure to save her brother. Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, and Richard E. Grant lead the film’s large voice cast.
“The ‘Wildwood’ poster behaves much like the forest does. It reveals just enough of itself to make you curious before withholding the really interesting bits,” director Travis Knight said in a statement about the poster. “The longer you look, the more it begins to unfold… Two lives intertwined, sharing a single silhouette. A familiar world giving way to a hidden, wilder one. Crows that gradually stop looking like birds and more like dramatic punctuation marks, drawing your eye to something impossible. Wonder, danger, loss, hope… and just enough mystery to make you want to know what happens next.”
Fathom Entertainment will release “Wildwood” in theaters October 23. Take a look at the film’s poster, and read Knight’s full statement, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
“How do you distill sixteen years of world-building into a single image?
It’s a bit like trying to summarize “War and Peace” on a Post-it Note. Or relocating the British Museum into a garden shed. You’d squeeze the Rosetta Stone in. Perhaps a mummy if you were prepared to unwrap it first. The Elgin Marbles? Not a chance.
Which, come to think of it, is probably for the best. They deserve to go home to Greece anyway.
The movie poster for “Wildwood” has a similarly unreasonable problem. It’s expected to perform an astonishing number of tasks simultaneously. It must intrigue people who’ve never heard of the film, reassure those who’ve loved the book for years, avoid revealing too much, reveal just enough, look good on the side of a bus, leave enough empty space for the release date, and somehow persuade complete strangers that spending two hours in the company of a murder of crows, haunted forests, and emotionally complicated adolescents would be an evening well spent.
It’s an absurd thing to ask of a single image.
Fortunately, this one cheats.
The “Wildwood” poster behaves much like the forest does. It reveals just enough of itself to make you curious before withholding the really interesting bits. The longer you look, the more it begins to unfold… Two lives intertwined, sharing a single silhouette. A familiar world giving way to a hidden, wilder one. Crows that gradually stop looking like birds and more like dramatic punctuation marks, drawing your eye to something impossible. Wonder, danger, loss, hope… and just enough mystery to make you want to know what happens next.
If you’re anything like me, you begin asking questions. Which is fortunate, because “Wildwood” is built almost entirely out of questions.
What waits beyond the edge of the known world? Can an ancient kingdom exist unnoticed in the shadows of modern civilization? What happens when love asks the impossible of us? How do we carry grief without allowing it to define us? And, because some questions simply insist upon being asked, what sort of planning permission is required to construct a palace in the middle of an enchanted forest?
I should probably confess that I’ve spent the better part of two decades making “Wildwood,” so my judgment is… suspect. At this point, I can no longer tell whether this poster is full of carefully layered visual metaphors or whether I’ve simply become the sort of person who thinks every crow is trying to tell him something.
Sixteen years have a way of leaving fingerprints on things…”
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