Laika’s Wildwood Premieres at London Film Festival

Laika’s long-gestating stop-motion fantasy Wildwood finally met an audience at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 11, with director Travis Knight and voice stars Carey Mulligan, Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay on hand for a world premiere years in the making. Deadline’s Pete Hammond reviewed the film out of London as Laika’s “most ambitious” project yet — a PG-13, 2-hour-12-minute adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel that opens theatrically Oct. 23 via Fathom Entertainment after also launching AFI Fest later this month. Variety covered the same Royal Festival Hall premiere, quoting Knight on a development-to-delivery timeline that stretches roughly 16 years.

According to Deadline, Prue McKeel (Lee) races into a forbidden Portland forest after a swarm of crows abducts her baby brother, with classmate Curtis (Tremblay) trailing behind into a talking-animal society ruled in part by Mulligan’s grief-struck Dowager Governess Alexandra. The ensemble also includes Angela Bassett as The General, Mahershala Ali as bandit leader Brendan, Awkwafina as loyal rat Septima, plus Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant. Six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel shot the stop-motion feature, a first for him in animation, with a visual palette drawn from Carson Ellis’s book illustrations.

Variety reported Knight joking through the painstaking process from the premiere stage: crews build thousands of tiny objects, photograph them, nudge them a microscopic distance and repeat “until either the film emerges or society collapses.” Production began in 2021 during COVID after Laika optioned the Meloy/Ellis book a decade earlier. “When we started Barack Obama was a fresh-faced president,” Knight said, adding that a child born at the project’s start “could have driven me to the premiere.”

Deadline framed Wildwood as a potential fifth straight Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination for Laika after Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls/Kubo-era streak language around the studio’s prior films, calling the stop-motion scale a “visual knockout” even while placing the story a notch below Tolkien/Narnia peaks. Variety separately confirmed the Oct. 23 U.S. Fathom release and a Black Bear UK rollout, noting it is Laika’s first PG-13 feature.

For animation readers tracking festival-to-theater corridors this fall, the Oct. 11 LFF bow turns a Portland backyard epic into a concrete release plan: London first, AFI Fest next, then the Oct. 23 Fathom window. Knight’s marathon timeline and Deschanel’s live-action camera sensibility are the talking points; Mulligan, Lee and Tremblay supply the premiere faces. Whether the Oscar streak continues is for voters later — the immediate news is that Wildwood is finally out of the woods and onto screens.

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Verification: Oct. 11 LFF world premiere, Travis Knight directing/producing, Carey Mulligan/Peyton Elizabeth Lee/Jacob Tremblay premiere presence, Meloy/Ellis source, Portland setting, key cast (Bassett, Ali, Awkwafina, Erskine, Johnson, Day, Waits, Grant), Caleb Deschanel cinematography, PG-13 / 2h12 runtime, Oct. 23 Fathom U.S. release and AFI Fest North American premiere from Deadline (Pete Hammond, Oct. 11, 2026). Sixteen-year timeline quotes, Royal Festival Hall stage remarks, Black Bear UK distribution and first Laika PG-13 note corroborated by Variety (Alex Ritman, Oct. 11, 2026).