LAIKA’s new stop-motion fantasy Wildwood made its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival yesterday, bringing the studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings to the Royal Festival Hall. The film screened on Sunday 11 October as part of the festival’s 70th edition, with director Travis Knight joined at the premiere by members of the cast including Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay and Carey Mulligan, as well as Wildwood author Colin Meloy. The project has been a long time coming, with LAIKA first optioning Meloy’s novel back in 2010.

Wildwood follows Prue, voiced by Lee, after her baby brother is carried away by a flock of crows into a mysterious forest. Determined to bring him home, she heads into the wilderness with her classmate Curtis, voiced by Tremblay, and discovers a hidden world filled with strange creatures, talking animals and rival groups fighting over the future of the forest.

The voice cast also includes Mulligan, Mahershala Ali and Angela Bassett, with Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Charlie Day, Jake Johnson, Maya Erskine, Jemaine Clement, Richard E. Grant, Tom Waits, Tantoo Cardinal, Rob Delaney and Marc Evan Jackson among the wider ensemble.

Knight directs the 132-minute film, with Chris Butler writing the screenplay. The pair both have plenty of history with LAIKA, with Knight previously directing Kubo and the Two Strings and Butler writing and directing ParaNorman. As with the studio’s previous films, Wildwood has been created using stop-motion animation, with its puppets and environments physically built and animated frame by frame.

The London Film Festival premiere marked the first public screening of the film, with another festival showing taking place at the Prince Charles Cinema on Saturday 17 October at 11:45am.

For CultureCues, Wildwood was another one of the London Film Festival premieres we were really looking forward to, and we were there at the Royal Festival Hall for its world premiere on Sunday. We love seeing just how far LAIKA continues to push stop-motion, and this is a huge fantasy world to take on in that form. The voice cast is brilliant too, and it was lovely getting to see the film with an audience for the very first time. We’ll have our full review of Wildwood on CultureCues soon.

Wildwood made its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday 11 October, with another festival screening taking place on Saturday 17 October.

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