Laika spent five years and 230 puppets on Wildwood — and said no to AI
Laika, the Oregon stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, has released Wildwood, its first feature in seven years. The film opened in theaters on 23 October 2026, and its director, Travis Knight, used the moment to draw a hard line: he called artificial intelligence “antithetical to everything that we are at this studio,” as reported by Emergent.
The numbers behind the film explain the stance. The production took five years and more than 230 individually sculpted puppets, including 36 different versions of the protagonist Prue, each built for specific scenes and emotional beats. Every frame was photographed by hand, with animators physically adjusting puppets between shots. The film adapts the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, and it arrives through Fathom Entertainment, a smaller distributor than the majors that handled Laika’s earlier films.
Early box office suggests the bet is holding up: Comic Basics reports an opening Friday of about $4.3 million, close to the studio’s past openers, with an A CinemaScore and a 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. TheWrap, cited in the same report, puts the budget well above $100 million, so profitability is a much harder test than opening weekend.
Why it matters to independent teams: Laika is treating slowness and handcraft as a market position, not a nostalgia trip. While larger animation houses adopt generative AI for pre-visualization and texture work, Laika is betting that audiences can feel the difference — and will pay for it. That is a useful frame for any small studio deciding where to stand on AI: the question is not whether to use the tools, but whether the tools are part of what you sell. If your value is speed and volume, AI is leverage. If your value is the human fingerprint, saying so out loud — and pricing accordingly — is the strategy. Wildwood’s run will be the first real test of which side of that line audiences reward.
Sources: Emergent, “Laika’s Wildwood Director Rejects AI in Stop-Motion Film”; Comic Basics on the opening weekend.