Laika's First PG-13 and an Alzheimer's Memoir: Animation Grows Up

The Motion Picture Association has rated Laika's "Wildwood" PG-13 — the first in the Portland studio's 17-year history as a feature filmmaker — for "strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language." At 140 minutes, the film also ties the record for the longest English-language animated feature ever made. Both facts land on Oct. 23, when Fathom releases the film, one day before the SCAD Savannah Film Festival opens its Oct. 24–31 run.

Travis Knight, who runs Laika and directed "Wildwood," did not arrive at that rating by accident. Anyone who remembers how dark the back half of "Kubo and the Two Strings" got, he suggests, saw this coming. Knight adapts Chris Butler's screenplay from Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis's 2011 novel: Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) enters the forbidden woods outside Portland after her baby brother is taken and stumbles into a war. The studio built 136 sets and 231 puppets to get her there.

Knight is one of the directors speaking at this year's Pixels and Pencils panel, Variety's animation directors conversation at SCAD Savannah, now in its fifth year. He is joined by Brad Bird ("Ray Gunn"), Daniel Chong ("Hoppers"), Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado ("Forgotten Island") and Leah Nelson ("Tangles").

Is this panel an Oscar bellwether?

It has been. Gints Zilbalodis appeared in 2024 with "Flow" before that indie upset the studios for the animated feature Oscar. Last year, four of the eventual five nominees at the 98th Academy Awards — including winner "KPop Demon Hunters" — spoke at the event.

The category itself has shifted. Since "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio" won at the 95th ceremony, the trophy has not returned to Disney or Pixar: "The Boy and the Heron," "Flow" and "KPop Demon Hunters" followed. That breaks a hold the two studios have held since "Shrek" took the first trophy in 2002. Laika, for its record, is five for five in animated feature nominations, from "Coraline" to "Missing Link," and zero for five in wins — though "Missing Link" beat "Toy Story 4" and "Frozen II" at the Golden Globes.

What are the other films?

• "Ray Gunn" (Netflix, Dec. 18). Bird has chased the project since 1996, pitching it as "The Maltese Falcon" meets "Buck Rogers." Sam Rockwell plays gumshoe Raymond Gunn, investigating a murder in Metropia, a 1939 that never happened, where humans and aliens share the same smoky streets. Netflix releases it Dec. 18 after London Film Festival screenings and a limited 70mm run. The PG rating carries a note about "suggestive material" — which, given Bird's work, tracks. "The Incredibles" was, after all, about a man who hates his insurance job and misses his glory days.
• "Hoppers" (Pixar). Chong, creator of "We Bare Bears," made his feature directing debut with Mabel (Piper Curda), a student who uploads her mind into a robot beaver to talk animals out of losing their forest to developers. It opened to $46 million in March — the best start for an original since "Coco" in 2017 — and cleared $500 million worldwide in about five weeks, a studio-wide exhale after "Elemental" and "Elio" stumbled. It is also about habitat loss, and a robot face-removal scene has reportedly sent younger viewers to the lobby.
• "Forgotten Island" (DreamWorks). Crawford and Mercado, friends since "Kung Fu Panda 2" and co-directors of the Oscar-nominated "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish," follow Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano), childhood friends in 1990s Philippines pulled apart when Raissa heads to Caltech — then trapped in Nakali, a place from Philippine folklore that eats memories. DreamWorks putting this muscle behind a Filipino story means something.
• "Tangles" (Independent Film Company). Nelson, a first-time feature director, wrote it with Sarah Leavitt, adapting Leavitt's graphic memoir about her mother's Alzheimer's in the late 1990s. Abbi Jacobson voices Sarah; Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her mother and produces with Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen. The film earned a seven-minute ovation at Cannes, and its charcoal-heavy animation does something with memory that live action could not.

What does this change for the category?

Both "Tangles" and "Wildwood" will compete as dramas at the Golden Globes, where animated titles have usually defaulted to comedy. It is category paperwork, technically, but it signals how these teams want their films seen.

Caveats: none of this is new. "Persepolis" and "Anomalisa" were nominated years ago, Japanese studios have made adult animation for as long as cinema has existed, and only three animated films — "Beauty and the Beast," "Up" and "Toy Story 3" — have ever been nominated for best picture, the last 15 years ago. What feels different in 2026 is the confidence: nobody on this panel is asking whether their story is "allowed" to be animated. Variety's current predictions list "Wildwood" as the animated feature frontrunner, with "Hoppers," "Ray Gunn," "Tangles" and "Toy Story 5" alongside it. Whether that confidence survives awards season is the question Savannah's track record suggests we should take seriously.