Laika finally dropped the first real trailer for Wildwood and ok, I've watched it four times already. The Portland stop-motion studio has been sitting on this one for literal years, and you can feel all that patience in the footage. October 23, theaters. Put it in your phone right now.

If you don't know Laika by name you know them by feel. Coraline. Kubo and the Two Strings. ParaNorman. They make stop-motion look weirdly alive, and honestly they're also the reason the whole art form hasn't just... vanished. Based on the trailer, Wildwood is carrying that weight just fine.

Also it's adapted from the novel by Colin Meloy. yes, the Decemberists guy. So the whole thing is deeply Pacific Northwest: Portland author, Portland band, Portland studio. The story follows Prue McKeel, a Portland kid whose baby brother gets carried off by crows into the Impassable Wilderness, this forest outside the city nobody enters and comes back from. She goes in after him. Obviously.

The trailer leans SO hard into the moody Oregon thing. Mist. Moss. Crows. Bridges that look like the ones actual Portlanders bike over every day. It's quintessentially Portland but earned, not touristy.

And can we talk about the craft for a sec because I paused it more than once just to sit in the detail. Frame by frame animation. Physical puppets. Real sets. In a year where everything is racing toward whatever pipeline is fastest, Laika is still out here moving tiny faces with tweezers. My grandma taught me to respect people who build real things with their hands and this is exactly that, just with millions of dollars and a slightly insane amount of patience.

After years of "it's coming, we promise," the trailer existing at all feels like an event, and now there's an actual date. October 23. Circled.

If you slept on Kubo, fix that this weekend and thank me later. And keep Wildwood on your radar, because stop-motion this ambitious does not come around often and it deserves eyes.