Here’s laika’s Wildwood Will Shatter a Guinness World Record When It Premieres, And It Took More Than A Decade

Laika has become one of the only stop-motion animation studios left in the world, and with films like Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings, and the upcoming Wildwood under its belt, it’s safe to say that no one else is really doing things quite like them. Though others are still around and kicking, the almost two decades of consistency have made them a fan favorite, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down, especially since their most ambitious project hasn’t even arrived yet. When Wildwood premieres this October, though, an all-new scale of stop-motion will make its debut, and one that blows a world record out of the water.

ComicBook had the opportunity to visit Laika in Portland, Oregon, to learn more about Wildwood ahead of its debut. While there, the team confirmed that the 2019 Guinness World Record that they set with the movie Missing Link, which was for “Most 3D printed faces made for a stop-motion film,” will be annihilated by Wildwood. The 2019 stop-motion movie set the record with 106,000 faces, but Wildwood had more. Brian McClean, Director of Rapid Prototype at Laika, revealed: “I think we’re about 142,000.”

Wildwood Will Shatter a Guinness World Record

The frame-by-frame animations for Wildwood go even deeper than some of Laika’s other movies as well, with McClean confirming that all those faces are going to good use, and there’s a reason there’s no repetition.

“We are producing in certain shots one face for every frame in the movie, which means 24 faces for one second of footage…No director really wanted to ever be told that they were reusing a performance or reusing a smile. My character’s going on this amazing emotional journey. I don’t want to use the same smile I used at the beginning of the movie at the end.”

For Sam Wilson, the real story of Wildwood is the way that Laika has scaled up over the years, revealing that the movie has 130 sets with over 200 puppets. This trend of scale is clear not only from the scope of the movie itself but even from Wilson’s titles at the company. Previously, he worked as a second assistant director on ParaNorman, a first Assistant Director on The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, and is now one of the producers on Wildwood.

“Coraline took place in a house… ParaNorman takes place in town. Boxtrolls takes place in the city. Kubo takes place in the country. Missing Link takes place on planet Earth. And now we have Wildwood, which kind of takes place in two different worlds.”

Production on Wildwood started in 2020, nine years after it was confirmed that Laika had optioned the rights to the book. Wilson confirmed that practical animation wrapped on the movie last year and that they’re in the process of putting the finishing touches on the visual effects.

“When all is said and done, we had over 1,000 employees work on the project. There will be over 165,000 individual frames that are in the film, which we all captured one frame at a time, but various between 15 minutes and an hour in some cases. So it is definitely a labor of love, and I hope that you get to see that realized.”

Wildwood will debut on October 23.