A hand-tooled story of grief has made its 16-year journey to the screen

When he was a little boy, Travis Knight was transfixed by the pioneering films of the stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, whose signature works – including Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981) – transformed special-effects cinema.

Then, on television, he encountered the work of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, whose production company, Rankin Bass, created a slate of definitive stop-motion animated Christmas and holiday TV specials that remain a staple of pop culture to this day, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1968) and The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974).

“Stop-motion, it was a rarity even then, and for whatever reason I was drawn to it,” Knight says. “I loved other animation, I loved hand-drawn animation and this was before CG animation even existed. But there was something about stop-motion that was special, and I felt was very precious.”

The spark ignited by those moments would eventually lead to Knight becoming one of the most significant filmmakers of his generation. In 2009, he was the lead animator on the critically acclaimed Coraline. He would go on to found the stop-motion animation studio Laika, whose most recent film, Wildwood, arrives in cinemas this week.

“If Ray Harryhausen had not existed, Wildwood would not exist. The Odyssey would not exist,” Knight says. “On some level, you can say that there’s something crude about it looking at it through today’s lens. But to me, I would say there’s something extraordinary and beautiful and human about [those films], and I think that’s why they endure.”

Based on Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s 2011 novel, Wildwood is the story of a teenage girl named Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who travel into an enchanted forest searching for Prue’s infant brother after he is abducted. Once there, they encounter Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), a mysterious woman whose incalculable grief has been transformed into something far darker.

Wildwood explores fear, grief, loss and powerlessness in a way that is almost contrary to modern storytelling, where children are a key part of the audience. While older audiences may recall a childhood when bolder content was commonplace, contemporary family films are often simplified and sanitised.

“It felt like it was different growing up in the ’80s, that there was a lot of free-range parenting back then,” Knight says. “But I also think the filmmaking was different, there were many films that were targeted towards families, targeted towards children, that had degrees of sophistication, that actually treated children with a great deal more respect than I think a lot of the films that are targeted towards families these days [do].

“It’s certainly never been the way that we’ve operated at Laika; we always look at our audience with tremendous respect and never want to talk down to our audience, whether it’s an audience of grown-ups or an audience of children,” Knight adds.

“Young people have way more emotional complexity than people often give them credit for, and I feel like we forget,” he says. “As grown-ups, we think that we have the monopoly on pain and struggling and suffering, but we do not. Children know what it’s like to feel alone. They know what it’s like to feel afraid and to feel powerless and to have things taken away from them, to have people taken away from them. They know what darkness is.”

Understanding that reality is the reason fairy tales are evergreen stories, Knight adds. “Darkness does exist, but what fairytales often gave us was a lantern, they gave us a path through the darkness, a path through the forest, and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do with Wildwood.

“It is a film that is about some really profound human experiences. It’s about loss, grief, love and empathy. There is darkness in the movie, and I do think that there’s great light in the movie, but we earn the light honestly. Fantasy, as a step removed from our own reality, can give shape to really complex and difficult ideas and emotions.”

As a director, stop-motion animation – in which the film is shot frame by frame while making microscopic adjustments to puppets and settings – is a challenging form, Knight says.

“I’ve said many times, and I absolutely believe it, that making a film in stop-motion is the absolute hardest and worst way there is to make a movie,” Knight says. “It’s painful, it’s awful, and yet I do think that there’s more joy in the process. It’s certainly not the easiest way there is to make a film.”

“Darkness does exist, but what fairytales often gave us was a lantern, they gave us a path through the darkness, a path through the forest, and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do with Wildwood.”

Travis Knight, Wildwood director

And yet, in a film industry in the process of being overtaken by AI-based technology, Knight’s studio, Laika, stands like a bulwark against the rapidly changing times.

“I think [stop-motion] is the most human way there is to make a film because essentially, what you’re looking at when you’re seeing a stop-motion film, is every single thing has been designed, built, and manipulated by an artist’s hand, and every single shot has been brought to life by the imagination, the spirit, and the hands of an animator.”

“It’s imperfect, it’s maddening, it’s painful, it’s slow, but it’s also beautiful because it is the accumulation of all these extraordinary acts of devotion, on the part of people who really love something and want to bring it to life,” Knight says.

Knight likens the glacial pace of shooting in stop-motion to “filmmaking at the speed of continental drift; it takes forever to do these things.” And while it has been said that stop-motion requires almost infinite patience, Knight believes stop-motion filmmakers are better defined by concentration.

“[Patience] is certainly an element of it, but I really think one of the key attributes an animator has to have to work in stop-motion is intense focus for long periods of time, the ability to concentrate on really, really small details and put all these different things together in their mind,” he says.

“It’s a very technical exercise, but it can never feel like a technical exercise,” Knight adds. “It has to feel like it’s an organic performance.”

In part, the film’s magic is that these miniaturised environments – scaled-down worlds, and small, puppet-like characters – are a strange reflection of our own childhood playtime, almost as though you’re looking at action figures and the kind of makeshift dioramas we once made from leftover craft scraps in corners of the back garden.

In that world, hand-crafted but rich with possibility, filmmaking in a universe of living toys, the storytelling is somehow empowered by the idea that the barrier between a child’s imagination and what is being expressed on the movie screen is paper thin.

“There’s an aspect of stop-motion that I’ve always felt like it’s as if we’re seeing a child’s plaything being brought to life,” Knight says. “It’s interesting because I remember my own experience as a child, with my beloved playthings and how I’m telling stories through them, how I’m channelling my own ideas, my own imagination, my own hopes, my own fears, my own worries through these things that I play with.

“I see it with my own children who play with their dolls, with their action figures, with their toys,” he adds. “We as people are natural storytellers, and sometimes we’re telling stories through the things that we love, whether it’s a toy or a bunch of fancy puppets on a stage in Portland, Oregon.

“It’s what I love about storytelling. And it’s what I love specifically about this form of storytelling; an extraordinary group of people, craftsmen, artists, technicians who desperately love this process so much, as hard as it is, as painful it is, and pour themselves into it. It’s a magic trick. It’s beautiful, and it’s why we continue to do what it is that we do.”

Wildwood is in cinemas now.

Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.