LAIKA's Wildwood Opens With a Suicide and Earns Its PG-13 in a Minute

LAIKA's Wildwood cold-opens with a young boy killing himself — then ripping out his insides to reveal he was an automaton run on cogs. That's the first minute. The film earned its PG-13 rating before most viewers have settled into their seats, and director Travis Knight is only testing the waters.

The review comes from The Film Stage, which premiered its verdict at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. The film opens in theaters on October 23. The verdict is blunt: "It's among the best animated films in recent memory."

What is Wildwood?

Knight adapts Colin Meloy's 2011 YA novel — Meloy is the lead singer of The Decemberists — into a lavish stop-motion fantasy. The story follows Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a Portland girl babysitting her baby brother Mac. Crows swarm him at a playground and carry him off into the vast, impenetrable woods surrounding the city. It's Hitchcock's The Birds restaged for children, and the review notes Knight recreates that exact image: a murder of crows descending on unsuspecting kids.

Prue and her nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) venture in after the forest mysteriously opens a path. They're separated by an anthropomorphic coyote army. Curtis lands before the former governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), who sees in him a replacement for her long-dead son — a replica she has tried and failed to build before. Alexandra holds baby Mac for sinister reasons while clan tensions inside the woods boil over. Saving the brother means saving the realm.

How dark is it, exactly?

Darker than anything rival animation studios offer. The reviewer frames it as Brothers Grimm by way of Tolkien rather than Disney, with Hayao Miyazaki as the true contemporary parallel — dark, unsanitized tales where wonder and grimness coexist as they did in the oldest bedtime stories. Screenwriter Chris Butler and Knight, the review argues, aren't chasing the sleepover-horror crowd. They trust young viewers' intelligence.

The gothic imagery never relents. Characters are shaped forever by the darkness they encounter, not just thrilled by the fantastical creatures crossing their paths. The reviewer's line: it's only because this is stop-motion (animation filmed frame-by-frame with physically moved puppets) that the darkness reads as novel. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis adaptations have long been embraced by young readers.

Can it really match Lord of the Rings?

Frequently, yes — and the review says so with a straight face. In character design and the staging of sweeping action, Wildwood invites comparisons to Peter Jackson's original Lord of the Rings trilogy and, remarkably, "manages to live up to" them. One battle scene feels "positively reminiscent of Jackson's Helm's Deep," even as it pauses mid-chaos to show how the violence scars its characters. The scale is smaller than Jackson's, given the limits of a stop-motion crew. It doesn't feel smaller.

The technical list runs long:

• Soaring aerial sequences
• Gag-a-minute slapstick chases
• Sets that transform as reeds grow across every surface

The review calls these some of the most ambitious moments LAIKA has ever put to life — and notes the trick of their success: "the movie satisfies the heart so much that the head stops seeking to work out how they did it."

Why this matters for LAIKA

Context matters here. Missing Link, the studio's 2019 globe-trotting adventure, remains the most expensive stop-motion film ever made — and recouped the smallest fraction of its cost. Since Paranorman in 2012, LAIKA has positioned itself as a reviver of genres unfashionable with today's kids. The acclaim has been real. The balance sheet has not cooperated.

Wildwood may not draw young audiences in droves, the review concedes. But it reaches for the Velvet Underground comparison: few people heard The Velvet Underground & Nico at first, and those who did formed their own bands. The kids who see Wildwood may make art of their own. LAIKA closes with its customary mid-credits behind-the-scenes reel — the magician happily revealing the secrets — and the reviewer finds something "oddly moving" about watching Knight's team walk through character design in an era when studio animation grows only more risk-averse.

For older viewers, it's simpler: the magic and terror of the classic fantasy canon, recaptured on a breathtaking scale. For LAIKA, October 23 will show whether ambition of this size can finally find its audience.