LAIKA's stop-motion adaptation of Wildwood, directed by Travis Knight with Carey Mulligan and Mahershala Ali in the voice cast, has its world premiere at the Royal Festival Hall.
LAIKA’s stop-motion adaptation of Wildwood has its world premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 11 October 2026, an afternoon Gala in the first weekend of the seventieth London Film Festival.
Its director, Travis Knight, was born in Hillsboro, Oregon, in 1973, the son of the Nike co-founder Phil Knight, and recorded hip hop as Chilly Tee before he turned to animation. He animated on Coraline and ParaNorman at LAIKA, the Portland stop-motion studio he now runs as chief executive, and made his debut as director with Kubo and the Two Strings in 2016, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Bumblebee, his first live-action film, followed in 2018, and he has since directed Masters of the Universe.
Wildwood adapts the first of Colin Meloy’s Wildwood Chronicles, a 541-page novel drawn from classic fantasy and folk tales and published in 2011 with illustrations by Carson Ellis. When a flock of crows carries off her baby brother, a girl named Prue follows them into a hidden forest of magical beings. Chris Butler wrote the screenplay, and Peyton Elizabeth Lee leads a voice cast of Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali and Angela Bassett.
Knight was named its director in 2021, with Butler writing, and Black Bear distributes the film in Britain. The Gala is its first screening anywhere in the world.