Laika’s Wildwood introduces one of the most ambitious stop-motion characters the studio has ever built: The General, a golden eagle voiced by Angela Bassett. The towering bird commands key scenes alongside Prue, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, a teenager on a mission to rescue her brother, according to The New York Times.
Laika built three separate puppets of the General: two designed for the flying sequences and one for when the eagle’s wings are folded. At about two and a half feet tall with a five-foot wingspan, the General dwarfs Laika’s typical 11-inch puppets. “We’ve never made a puppet that’s this large that needed to behave so organically ever before,” said Brad Schiff, the studio’s head of animation.
The feathers alone are staggering. Each was made of laser-cut polyester satin, then dyed, embossed, and individually superglued to the puppet’s muscle suit. A team led by fabricator Austen Weitzel cut between 3,700 and 4,000 feathers for each puppet, adding up to about 12,000 in total. Select feathers were posable and wired so animators could manipulate them, from the wingtip “fingers” to the feathers on the neck.
To sell the illusion of life, the puppets carry “breathers,” mechanisms that simulate inhaling and exhaling. Laika first tried breathers on Missing Link (2019); on Wildwood, nearly every puppet has one. The animator uses a hex wrench in the back of the puppet to drive the General’s mechanical diaphragm. The neck is a Slinky-like spiral structure, 3-D printed so it could elongate and bend without collapsing, paired with an extendable barbell driven by a rack-and-pinion mechanism controlled by a bicycle brake cable.
Motors on the puppet’s shoulders let the wings hold position and be moved remotely via dials. “We ended up with the most sophisticated armature we’ve ever produced for a puppet at Laika,” said Oliver Jones, head of characters and practical effects. Animators worked with one face 3-D printed for every frame of performance, completing just one to four seconds of animation per week. Dobrin Yanev handled the flying sequences, spending four years to complete the flight sequence, while Anthony Straus animated a scene involving a postmaster’s van.
We covered the final trailer last week. Wildwood opens in theaters October 23, and the full craft breakdown is in the linked New York Times piece.
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