Wildwood Makes London Film Festival Debut Ahead of UK Cinema Release

LAIKA’s ambitious new stop-motion fantasy Wildwood has made its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival ahead of its arrival in UK cinemas later this month.

The Wildwood UK release is set for 23 October 2026, bringing the latest film from the studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings to British audiences.

The film premiered in London on Sunday, with the BFI London Film Festival presenting the film as one of its major family premieres.

It is LAIKA’s sixth stop-motion feature and one of the studio’s most ambitious productions yet.

What is Wildwood about?

Wildwood follows teenager Prue McKeel after her baby brother is carried away by a murder of crows into a mysterious forest known as the Impassable Wilderness.

Determined to rescue him, Prue ventures into the hidden world alongside her classmate Curtis.

What they find is considerably stranger than a normal forest.

The wilderness is filled with talking animals, bandits, rival factions and powerful figures fighting over the future of the land.

LAIKA’s official description explains that Prue becomes caught in a much larger conflict while trying to bring her brother home, turning what begins as a rescue mission into a full fantasy adventure.

Carey Mulligan leads a huge voice cast

The cast is unusually extensive for an animated film.

Peyton Elizabeth Lee voices Prue, with Jacob Tremblay playing Curtis.

Carey Mulligan takes on the role of the sinister Alexandra, while Mahershala Ali voices Brendan.

The wider cast includes Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Charlie Day, Jake Johnson, Maya Erskine, Jemaine Clement, Richard E. Grant, Tom Waits, Tantoo Cardinal, Rob Delaney and Marc Evan Jackson.

That combination gives Wildwood one of the most recognisable voice ensembles LAIKA has assembled.

Everything is made frame by frame

The biggest attraction may still be the way the film has been created.

LAIKA specialises in stop-motion animation, meaning physical puppets, costumes and environments are constructed and then photographed incrementally to create movement.

It is an extraordinarily slow process compared with conventional computer animation.

LAIKA describes Wildwood as a handcrafted fantasy in which characters and environments were physically built and animated frame by frame.

The studio’s previous films have all been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Wildwood now takes that approach into a much larger fantasy world filled with armies, creatures and enormous forest environments.

The film comes from the director of Kubo and the Two Strings

Travis Knight directs and produces the film.

Knight previously directed LAIKA’s Kubo and the Two Strings, as well as live-action films including Bumblebee and the recent Masters of the Universe.

The screenplay is by Chris Butler, who previously wrote and directed ParaNorman.

The story is adapted from the fantasy novel written by Colin Meloy, best known as the frontman of The Decemberists, and illustrated by Carson Ellis.

The book became the first part of a trilogy, giving the filmmakers a substantial fantasy mythology to translate onto the screen.

Early reaction highlights the old-fashioned fantasy feel

The first reviews emerging from London have focused heavily on the film’s handmade appearance and traditional fantasy storytelling.

The Guardian described the film as an old-fashioned magical-forest adventure with LAIKA’s distinctive stop-motion craftsmanship at its centre.

That makes Wildwood stand out in a cinema landscape dominated by computer-generated animation.

Every puppet and physical set gives the film a texture that is difficult to reproduce digitally.

When is Wildwood released in the UK?

Wildwood opens in UK cinemas on 23 October 2026.

The release comes less than two weeks after its London Film Festival premiere.

That means British audiences will be among the first general cinema audiences to see the finished film.

The timing also places it perfectly into the autumn half-term period, giving families a major new animated release just before Halloween.

For LAIKA, the stakes are significant.

The studio has built a reputation around films that look completely different from mainstream animation but take years to produce.

The Wildwood UK release now brings its biggest fantasy world yet to cinemas.

And in an era increasingly dominated by digital imagery, there is something rather appealing about a film whose forests, creatures and characters were still moved into place one tiny frame at a time.