'Wildwood' Is a Love Letter to All Things Portland, Oregon

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Wildwood.

There are several times when Prue, the 13-year-old protagonist of fantasy epic Wildwood, seems just as in disbelief of the magical world she inhabits as us viewers. As someone who grew up in Portland, Oregon, she thinks she's already encountered the limits of weirdness, and yet—as one of the giant animal denizens of the Impassable Wilderness (known by locals as Wildwood) is quick to remind her—there she is, speaking with an owl having tea in a waistcoat. Par for the course for the stop-motion studio, Laika's newest creation is a visual feast with soaring eagles the size of commercial airplanes, ancient trees with roots that sprawl across the whole realm, and even an all-out war between worlds reminiscent of the D-Day Landing in Saving Private Ryan. As much as you could lose yourself in these grand spectacles, the film is also emphatic about remembering the magic that imbues just a single blade of grass. As the first Laika movie explicitly set in Portland, the studio looked for inspiration in their own backyards for how to bring the universe of Colin Meloy's titular novel to life. Condé Nast Traveler spoke with Wildwood director Travis Knight on the inspiration behind this exhilarating, stop-motion saga that takes place not too far from home.

This movie is such a love letter to Portland, from the Voodoo Doughnuts Prue and Mac eat to the Decembrists posters in her room. This is the first Laika film that’s been explicitly set where the studio calls home. How did that influence the filmmaking process?

It was a joy, unlike anything I've ever experienced. Filmmaking for me is such a privilege to be able to do for a living. To be able to tell a story that was set in the place that I was born, the place that I've lived almost my entire life, the place where our studio is, where so many of us live, was a very special experience because we know that place better than anybody, and we could bring that world to life with real specificity, with real personality. The Portland that you see on screen in Wildwood, while it's a stylized reality because it's animation, very much does represent the truth of what it means to live in that part of the world.

One recurring theme in the film is that magic exists in everyday life, in Portland and in the places we least expect. Is the reverse true as well—in the magical realm of Wildwood, are there fingerprints of Portland and the PNW that the audience can look forward to?

There's magic in real life, and there is danger in the fantasy world—both of those things are true. I think when you look at Wildwood the place, not the movie, there are places from Portland, the Pacific Northwest, and Oregon, specifically all over it. Crater Lake is in there, Haystack Rock is, and there's all these different, beautiful places of Oregon that we infused into this fantasy land, and that was a great joy. We treated Wildwood the place as if it was an “Oregon's greatest hits” fantasyland. The idea of treating Oregon on the same plane as some of the great fantasy realms from my youth like Narnia and Oz and Middle Earth was crazy to even think about. It was great to be able to showcase that beauty on the big screen.

There’s a lot of well-deserved applause for the entirely hand-crafted approach to this film. There's a brilliant blink-and-you-miss-it moment where Prue and Mac pass by an art fair in St. Johns, and a craftsperson selling their wares has a sign at their table saying to get human-made art “before it's gone for good.” For this film, did you look to Portland’s own craft and visual arts culture for inspiration?

That's part of the way I look at the world, and it's where our community is from. That particular sign is a visual gag, but it's also something that you would see in Portland. I also think it is a meaningful statement that is relevant to the film and to our culture at large. There is a huge maker community in Portland. It's a group of people that actually celebrates handcrafted things, and that really is what's beating at the heart of the movie, that the film is a celebration of human creativity, of human innovation, of the human touch, and in a world that's often designed to be frictionless, easier, and automated. I think the human touch is something that's special and deserves to be celebrated and deserves to be preserved.

Stop motion is such a deliberate practice, where every wrinkle is quite literally sculpted. As a director, are there specific details about a place that you gravitate towards or like to use as launch points?

I think when you're approaching a story, you really want to listen to what the story wants to tell you. When I think about Kubo and the Two Strings, I go back to my own experiences when I was exposed to Japan for the first time. I was eight years old with my father, and it was a world unlike anything that I'd ever seen before. It left a huge impact on me, and those were the types of things that I was channeling. When I was making Bumblebee, I thought back to my experience of being exposed to the Transformers cartoons for the very first time. So you start putting these things through your own prism, and with Wildwood, it was very simple because it was the part of the world that I know better than anywhere. Settings, they have their own personality. Ultimately, what is driving all of these things is the theme and the emotion underneath it, and that is the thing that everything else needs to spiral out of. So, in the end, that's really the thing I think about more than anything else: what is the story trying to say, and what is the emotion that we're trying to convey?

One of the most circulated facts about the film is the 16-year timeline it took to bring it to life. How did Portland change in that time, and what did your team want to keep sight of when characterizing the city?

Portland has changed a lot in 16 years, just like the entire world has changed a lot in 16 years. I first read Colin Molloy's manuscript in 2010. The first movie that we came out with [Coraline] was in 2009, so it was only a year after that that I discovered Wildwood. Portland is a very different place now than it was then. Many, many things have happened since then, some very positive, some tragic. We moved the film into pre-production in 2019, seven years ago. I felt like at the time, we were ready to make Wildwood. Then the whole world turned upside down, and we were hit with a global pandemic the likes of which we had not seen in a century. It changed the whole world, and it changed Portland, and when I see the version of Portland on screen in Wildwood, it's the Portland that I know and the Portland that I love. My hope is that, in time, it can become that again.

What were the most challenging sets to construct and animate for Wildwood?

Nothing is easy in stop-motion. Everything is difficult in stop motion. But the things that tend to be more manageable are interiors, like a child's bedroom, but even those have so many details that have to be thought of and designed and built and manipulated. What's difficult to do is nature because organic shapes have their own unique grammar. Things like a forest are really difficult to do in stop motion, and I made the decision to set a movie that was almost entirely based in a forest. It's the materials you use, how you build these things, their shape. There's so much beauty to the natural world that's so different and so strange compared to the inorganic world, the things that we humans construct, and most of the film is set in those places. Places like when Prue and Curtis enter Wildwood for the very first time took us a long time to design what that looked like, and it is just so exquisitely gorgeous. It's so beautiful. It took set designers, set dressers, painters, artists, just so many people who built this space to be a work of art. It's something that belongs in a museum, and for a lot of the movie, that moment will pass by within a matter of seconds. What you're seeing is just extraordinary human craftsmanship and artistry on a grand scale, and it's one of the things I love so much about this movie.

How did you incorporate the wildlife and ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest into this film?

As someone who grew up in the Portland area, I have a lot of knowledge of coyotes. We have a lot of knowledge of crows. We're always next to the natural world. I grew up outside of Portland, essentially on the side of a mountain. I spent most of my childhood days wandering around the forest and climbing up trees and discovering things. The film is emotionally about one primal thing, but there are a lot of layers to the story that we're telling, and part of that is that the film is an eco-fable. That was something that we treated seriously, as it’s something that so many of my collaborators care about deeply, and it’s something I care about deeply. We wanted to try to express that in an organic way without feeling like we were emblazoning it in neon that we're making a message movie. The hope is that you want to honor these things in a way that feels authentic. There's no greater teacher to you than observation, and going out in nature, and seeing how the world was formed, independent of how we’ve tried to shape it. Fortunately, in Oregon, one of the many great gifts of the state is that in any direction you go, you will discover it. We poured so much of that into this movie.

Now that you’re on the other side of creating a movie based on where you call home, do you have any words to the wise for any creatives out there who feel daunted to tell their own stories about home?

What is the piece of advice that they leave out on the old chair-side chest? It was something like writing what you know. I don't think that necessarily means write where you're from, but you have a unique way of looking at the world based on your experiences within it. We know our own lives, unlike anyone else, but that's also the thing that we have to offer that no one else can offer. That's the one thing an artist can do that nobody else can do. They know their own experiences, they own their mind, they know their own imagination, which is different than everybody else's. It's the one thing that we can really offer—how you've lived, how you grew up, the people you grew up with, the people you've interacted with. Every place has its own unique characteristics and its own unique personality. Even within that, our experiences are different from the person next to us. The daunting thing shouldn't be how to tell a story about your home, it's how to really honor the things that you're feeling, how to honor your imagination in a way that really does it justice. Those are all things that we strive to do as artists. We have big dreams, we have big feelings, and how can we get that out in a way that it makes sense to somebody, and it makes them care?