Wildwood, set in a magical world in the unruly forests bordering Portland, Oregon, is the newest film from animation house Laika. Founded in 2005, the studio became acclaimed for its work on films such as Coraline (2009) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). Laika champions practical effects and stop-motion animation—a flipbook-like filmmaking style in which objects are moved frame by frame to create the action seen on screen.
At 2 hours and 12 minutes, Wildwood is the longest stop-motion animated film ever made. The story follows the courageous Prue and her classmate Curtis as she embarks on a fantasy adventure in the forests to find her kidnapped baby brother. Costume designer Deborah Cook developed more than 200 pieces for Wildwood.
After her work on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Cook was approached by Laika to work on Coraline. After that production, she stuck with the studio. She was interested in how much Laika’s CEO Travis Knight, who directed Wildwood, was invested in stop-motion.
Wildwood is based on the 2011 middle-grade fantasy novel of the same name, written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis. In 2019, Cook got the Wildwood project and then the world shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic the following year. Stuck in Portland, the city where the film would take place, the costume designer found herself exploring the region with a whole new set of eyes.
All the while, Cook notes that she was “approaching this movie with a really fantastical element plus contemporary Portland.” Ahead of Wildwood’s October 23 release, Cook spoke with Smithsonian magazine about the knits and peacoats that she created to adorn the movie’s characters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What were your first reactions to hearing the breadth of storytelling for Wildwood and the genres you’d pass through to tell the story in costumes?
It didn’t actually feel too daunting because I feel like it’s a reality that we live in Portland anyway. We work in an animation studio in the actual setting of Wildwood, so we live in that contemporary life in Portland, being aware of what everyone wears. It’s very much an outdoorsy kind of area.
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