Travis Knight debuts first unfinished Wildwood clips at Annecy

Annecy 2026 is where animation usually goes to flex polish, not expose the seams. But Laika’s Travis Knight brought something different: the first real footage from Wildwood, and specifically footage that is still unfinished.

Knight, the film’s director and also CEO and president of Laika, admitted he was a little nervous to show work-in-progress material to an audience outside the studio. He didn’t need to be. The opening clip drops viewers into Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and her family, with her parents voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine. Prue’s baby brother, Mac, is not allowed to go outside. Of course, he gets taken outside anyway, and the movie immediately establishes the central “fairy tale rule” that matters for the whole story: the rules are there for a reason, and breaking them has consequences.

Then Wildwood does what fantasy films do best, it escalates from “cute premise” to “oh, we’re going there.” While Prue is in Portland, the film nods to real Portland culture, including an actual Unipiper, a unicycle rider dressed as Darth Vader and playing a bagpipe. Knight’s approach here is telling: even when the footage is early, the movie is clearly calibrated to feel like a complete world. The clip also introduces Prue meeting her friend Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). At a playground, the crows arrive. Not a few crows. A flock described as a “murder” that abducts young Mac and drags him into the unknown. That disappearance is the inciting incident, the classic fantasy hallmark of a human spirited away to another realm while the heroine follows.

For decision-makers paying attention to where animation is heading, this isn’t just a creative tease. Wildwood is rooted in a book by the husband-and-wife team of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, and Knight said he reached out to Meloy and Ellis even before the book had been published about turning it into an animated film. Knight pinned that timing to “16 years ago,” which matters because it signals long runway planning, not a quick “content grab.” For companies, the ability to incubate a project for that long often correlates with budget discipline, production pipeline maturity, and a tolerance for the kind of complex craftsmanship Laika is known for.

The clips also reveal the production philosophy behind the spectacle. After the first screening, Knight talked about how Laika uses multiple disciplines rather than treating “stop-motion” like a single technique. He even joked, “We’re not Amish,” when discussing computer animation augmenting stop-motion. He described the film as a mixture of “art, craft and technology,” specifically a combination of different disciplines. What looks like one seamless shot on screen becomes, in practice, a patchwork of methods: sometimes puppets are animated against green screens and composited into photography of built sets. Other times, characters are computer-generated within built sets. And sometimes, it’s all stop-motion without much computer assistance besides removing rods or painting out bits of machinery.

This matters for executives because it’s a staffing and workflow story as much as a craft story. Laika’s second clip shifted into performance and character work with Curtis being interrogated by warriors in a realm beyond the Impassable Wilderness. Curtis fumbles the question of whether he’s a warrior, then meets Proxima, a talking rat voiced by Awkwafina. The rat doing backstrokes in Curtis’s soup is the kind of small, precise character animation moment that usually costs time and attention, the kind of detail that can separate “good” animation from “people remember it.” Knight then expanded on a core Laika principle: unlike traditional animation, animators at Laika animate everything in the shot. They are not only responsible for the character, but for everything around that character, including other characters that appear in the same frame. “It’s all up to the animator,” Knight explained.

On the image-making side, Wildwood also has star power behind the lens. Cinematography is handled by Oscar-winning Caleb Deschanel, and Knight said Deschanel asked, “What if we shoot this outside?” Knight had to inform Deschanel that shooting outside was not an option. That single exchange highlights a hard operational constraint that often defines production reality: the built environment and the stop-motion process shape what is even possible. It also reinforces why early footage at a major festival carries weight. When you show unfinished work, you’re not just sharing story beats. You’re inviting scrutiny of the pipeline, and Laika is clearly comfortable standing in front of that light.

The third and final clip pushed the technical envelope further: a sequence between Prue and the General, a giant golden eagle voiced as a stop-motion marvel by Angela Bassett. Knight framed it as one of Wildwood’s big technological and artistic feats. The puppet is huge, with hundreds of individually crafted feathers manipulated by hand. The eagle also “breathes,” thanks to new technology that Laika uses to raise and lower the chests of the stop-motion characters. The scene runs about halfway through the movie, featuring Prue flying on the eagle’s back while they talk. Prue is bringing her to Wildwood residents who the General thinks can help, and they’ll be around a mythic tree. When Prue asks, “They talk to a tree?” and then sneers with “Hippies,” the movie’s tone shows up clearly, even in a technical presentation. And yes, the crows are on the General’s tail, hinting at doom for Prue and the General.

Zooming out, Wildwood is being positioned as a different kind of fairy tale, a bedtime story for kids in 2026 where danger lurks around every corner, and growing up makes you more, not less, vulnerable to both earthly and ethereal threats. The strategic takeaway for executives across media and entertainment is straightforward: Laika is not competing just on narrative. It’s competing on how it converts long-horizon planning, multi-disciplinary production, and precision animation into consistent world-building. For boards and investors watching animation, this is a reminder that the moat is often the process itself. When that process is visible, even as unfinished footage, it becomes easier to evaluate what you’re really underwriting.