Wildwood couldn’t be a more local endeavor. Set in Portland, the film is based on the 2011 novel written and illustrated by Portlanders Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis and adapted by Hillsboro-based stop-motion studio Laika. Director Travis Knight has long felt an affinity for the work, while production designer Nelson Lowry found a connection close to home: He lives in Linnton, on the hillside below Forest Park, where Meloy and Ellis lived when they envisioned the book.
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Meloy’s Wildwood may have been marketed to children, but its appeal extends beyond that audience. The story follows Portland teenager Prue McKeel’s quest to find her brother after he’s carried off in a crow’s talons as a whole flock follows. She explores a mysterious wood just beyond city limits, encountering anthropomorphized creatures, folk magic, and a villain as traumatized as she is vengeful.
For Laika, bringing Wildwood to the screen didn’t just mean adapting a local story. The film became the studio’s most ambitious production to date.
The studio acquired film rights 16 years ago—before the novel was published—recognizing quickly that the adaptation would be an enormous undertaking. As production designer, Lowry was responsible for interpreting the script to develop Wildwood’s visuals and overall feel.
According to Lowry, Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) was Laika’s largest project prior to Wildwood. “When I say ‘largest,’ I mean size of sets and number of locations—we had 80 unique locations for that film,” Lowry said. “When I read the script and broke it down for Wildwood, it had about 136.”
By the time Wildwood was finally greenlit in 2020, Lowry had worked on several Laika films and before that, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), but this was the first time he’d taken on a production set so close to his home. “There was never a time I was riding my bike, hiking, or driving around Portland when I wasn’t recording in my mind or taking pictures,” he said.
Unlike a live-action movie, all 136 of Wildwood’s locations had to be constructed by hand. “You begin with a big outline and reference mood boards. Then you start sketching,” Lowry explained. Production kicked off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a six-person design team kept the project moving remotely.
Ellis’ folkloric illustrations gave Meloy’s novel a compelling visual identity. While Lowry’s team expanded on theWildwood world in original directions, they paid homage to Ellis’ work through the film’s aesthetic language.
“I found Ellis’ drawings to be so lyrical, elegant, and just beautiful, so I wanted to make sure that the film reflected some of those sensibilities,” he said. Devotees of the book should keep an eye out for Ellis Easter eggs: Her illustrations appear in murals, wallpaper, and crests on buildings.
Lowry envisioned Wildwood’s Portland as “weird, but not cloying.” He wanted the landscape to look magical to locals while also paying homage to the city for viewers worldwide.
“When I first flew into Portland a long time ago, it already felt pre-stylized by its size. The river coming in, the ports, Forest Park, downtown, the neighborhoods—Portland reminded me of a train model,” said Lowry. “I wanted to represent that, but also ensure it felt a little like Anytown, USA. I tried to focus on the things that made the city unique, yet relatable. I noticed public art, styles of dress, businesses.”
Knight also asked Lowry’s team to depict a vast world beyond the city limits. Wildwood’s flying sequences are populated with naturalistic backgrounds—the Painted Hills, the Columbia Gorge, and the Oregon Coast all appear. But nature is notoriously difficult to represent in stop motion. Replicating its dense textures gets messy.
“We found ways to code nature by clustering materials—patches of wildflowers, species of trees. The viewer is thrust into this world and has to accept it as real. I found the woods to be challenging, but I’m probably most proud of them,” Lowry said.
“The woods are a history of their life and death,” he continued. “You’ll see a bumpy landscape, and there’s basalt or granite under there, but there are also fallen trees. Detritus decays. Dirt builds up. There’s architecture under everything. It’s the history of what was once there, so we actually did that—we took shapes of trees and rocks, put material over it, and built a forest on top. Everything on screen grows here [in the Pacific Northwest]. There’s a realism to it. We want to make it feel like our locations were there before the film, and that they’ll be there afterward.”
As a stop-motion studio, Laika places painstaking emphasis on rendering sets and characters physically, but also incorporates digital tools. “With LiDAR [which stands for Light Detection and Ranging], you can scan a 3D object to a pretty high resolution and replicate it,” Lowry explained. Using LiDAR, Laika’s visual effects department expanded the physical sets.
“Let’s say we’re filming an area that we built,” said Lowry. “We’ve made around 15 buildings for it, but the camera lifts up, and we see that there are about 150 buildings in view. We couldn’t build that; it would be the size of the entire studio. So we take our scanned physical assets and dress the set outside of our physical build. It is digital, but everything is imbued with that handmade physical quality.”
Lowry feels that Wildwood blends physical and digital techniques seamlessly. “My hope when I’m designing a world is that it’s rich, immersive, and not distracting—that there’s a sense of place and history in every location. We really never cheat. Everything is fully rendered.”
Wildwood pays special homage to St. Johns, where Prue lives with her family. “I went to the St. Johns Theater recently, which is featured in the film. I went to see Obsession, a horror movie—I wasn’t expecting to catch the Wildwood trailer. You could feel the audience’s shock. The first thing on screen was St. Johns Bridge. At the end, everybody broke into applause.”
That moment made the years of work feel worthwhile.
“It felt so good,” Lowry said. “How special for that audience—their neighborhood, now represented in this extraordinarily vivid, beautiful, handmade world. That’s kind of Portland in itself, right? The maker mentality.”
Wildwood opens Fri Oct 23.
