Name: Wildwood
Genre: Animation, Adventure, Fantasy
Released: 2026-10-23T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 132 min
Cast: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Carey Mulligan, Jacob Tremblay, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett

A teenage girl named Prue walks out of Portland and into the Impassable Wilderness, the forest at the edge of the city, to take back her baby brother from the crows that carried him off. That is the premise of Wildwood, the new stop-motion feature from Laika, and it doubles as a fair description of the studio itself: a small Oregon company that has spent its whole existence going into the woods by hand, frame by frame, while the rest of animation moved to the computer.

What makes Wildwood matter beyond its premise is the scale of the wager. Laika has not released a feature since Missing Link, and it returns with its longest film, its first teen rating in the US and a reported nine-figure budget. Critics have answered with near-unanimous praise. The box office answered more cautiously, and the distance between those two verdicts is the most interesting thing about the film’s first week.

A children’s quest voiced by adults who carry weight

The two children at the centre are voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee as Prue and Jacob Tremblay as Curtis, the classmate who follows her into the forest. Around them, the casting reads like a statement of intent. Carey Mulligan voices Alexandra, the dowager governess whose war over the wilderness drives the plot and who, in the film’s synopsis, is a mother who lost her son. Mahershala Ali plays Brendan, leader of the bandits; Angela Bassett is the General, a colossal golden eagle; Awkwafina, Richard E. Grant, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg and Tom Waits fill out the forest’s factions. A film that wanted to be a romp would not cast Mulligan as its antagonist. This one wants grief at the centre, and it hired an actor known for playing it straight.

Knight’s return to the scale of Kubo

Travis Knight is Laika’s chief executive and the director of Kubo and the Two Strings, the studio’s samurai fable about memory and storytelling, before he made Bumblebee for the Transformers franchise. Wildwood brings him back to the epic register of Kubo, with a screenplay by Chris Butler, who co-directed ParaNorman and directed Missing Link. Laika optioned Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s novel within a week of its publication; Meloy is the frontman of The Decemberists and Ellis illustrated the book. Knight has said the studio needed to build new tools before it could do the book justice, and the gestation stretched across most of the company’s history as a feature studio.

The lineage matters for reading the film. Laika’s cinema, from Coraline onward, has kept returning to children who face death and abandonment at their own height, and stop-motion has always been the art of giving dead matter a pulse. Wildwood pushes the craft further: according to production notes, it used 136 sets and 231 puppets, with up to 24 printed faces per puppet for every second of film, and its crows were built digitally from scans of hand-sculpted models. Knight has described the climactic battle as a mix of hand-drawn, stop-motion and computer animation. The cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel, who shot The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff; bringing a live-action director of photography onto a puppet film suggests a studio that wants its miniature world lit and lensed as a real place.

Why it had to be PG-13

The rating is the film’s clearest argument. Knight has defended it in interviews about the release. “Modern cinema generally tends to talk down to young audiences,” he said. “But young people experience loss. They know what it’s like to feel afraid.” That is the Laika position stated plainly, and it puts Wildwood in an older tradition of fairy tales that frightened children on purpose. Dario Marianelli, who scored The Boxtrolls and Kubo, wrote the music, and The Decemberists contributed a new song.

What the acclaim does not settle

The praise has limits that the reviews themselves name. Screen International’s Wendy Ide, broadly positive, pointed to how familiar the fantasy plot is, with echoes of The Chronicles of Narnia and of Laika’s own Coraline. Rolling Stone Italia found the storytelling somewhat bland, and the Italian site Cinefilos gave it two and a half stars out of five, arguing that it lacks real originality next to other films in the genre. The structure is indeed familiar: a portal into a hidden country, a chosen girl, a war between factions. The commercial questions are sharper. A 132-minute running time and a PG-13 rating shrink the family audience that animated features depend on, and the US release runs through Fathom Entertainment, a distributor owned by cinema chains and better known for event screenings than for wide rollouts. Meloy has said that adapting the two sequel novels depends on how much this one resonates with audiences, which is another way of saying nobody knows yet.

Festivals, reviews and the first weekend

Wildwood had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, opened Alice nella Città in Rome, won the audience award at Sitges and opened AFI Fest in Los Angeles. On Rotten Tomatoes, 99% of 148 reviews are positive; Metacritic lists a score of 88, and opening-day audiences gave it an A CinemaScore. Empire’s John Nugent wrote that it “stretches the bounds of what cinematic stop-motion can be.” In North America it opened third with about $12.2 million from 2,942 locations, behind Clayface and You Can See Everything, more than double the opening of Missing Link and close to the $12.6 million of Kubo. Its first-weekend global total was around $15 million, against a reported production budget of $100 million.

Promotional artwork for Wildwood showing Prue reaching for her baby brother as crows carry him over a Portland bridge — Promotional artwork for *Wildwood* (2026): Prue reaches for her baby brother as crows carry him over a Portland bridge

The voice cast also includes Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine as Prue’s parents, Jemaine Clement and Tantoo Cardinal. Arianne Sutner produced with Knight, and FilmNation Entertainment handles international sales.

Wildwood opened in US theaters on October 23 through Fathom Entertainment, rated PG-13 and running 132 minutes. It opened the same day in the UK and Ireland through Black Bear in 655 cinemas, the widest release a Laika film has had there. Canada, Australia and New Zealand opened on October 22, and the rollout continues across Latin America and Europe in the coming weeks.