Wildwood to Premiere at Göteborg Film Festival Prisma

The spectacular stop-motion adventure Wildwood had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday. On October 24, the film will make its Swedish premiere at Göteborg Film Festival Prisma – the festival for young film lovers. Get your tickets here!

In Wildwood, teenager Prue McKeel sets out to find her little brother, who has been kidnapped by crows. The film is based on the popular children’s book by Colin Meloy, frontman of the indie rock band The Decemberists, and illustrator Carson Ellis.

The acclaimed animation studio Laika is behind the film adaptation, which is the studio’s most ambitious project to date. It has been hailed as the studio’s magnum opus and is tipped for an Oscar. The Oregon-based studio has yet to miss a single Oscar nomination, with all of its previous feature films receiving nominations in the Best Animated Feature category. The imaginative samurai adventure Kubo and the Two Strings received two nominations, for both Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects.

Speaking to the audience on stage at the world premiere, director Travis Knight revealed that the film had taken 16 years to make. Stop-motion is notoriously time-consuming as an animation technique. The studio built thousands of tiny objects, which were placed in front of a camera, lit and photographed. The objects were then moved a microscopic distance before another picture was taken. The process was repeated over and over again.

A Perfect Score from Critics

Production began in 2021, in the midst of the pandemic. But in fact, development had started a decade earlier. The film’s director put the timeline into perspective by pointing out that Barack Obama was still a fresh new face in politics at the time.

Not only has the film taken almost two decades to make, but Wildwood could also become one of the longest animated films ever made, with a runtime of 139 minutes, according to the film website Moviezine.

Since its world premiere, critics have been lavishing Wildwood with praise. At the time of writing, the film has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 19 reviews, meaning that every critic review has been positive. If the film maintains its score, it will mark the first time a Laika film has achieved a perfect score with critics.

Grab your tickets to Wildwood here!