New Wildwood video reveals the painstaking beauty of Laika's handcrafted animation

On general release as of today (23 October), Laika Studios' Wildwood is blowing audiences away. The epic stop motion masterpiece currently has a score of 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is the highest-rated animated film of the decade.

A lot of people new to Laika have expressed surprise at how incredibly clean the animation looks for stop motion. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, I highly recommend watching the behind-the-scenes video below. It provides an insight into just how big an accomplishment it was to make the movie by hand.

If you're inspired, see our guides to the best laptops for animation and the best animation software.

Wildwood is an adaptation of the 2011 children's fantasy novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and illustrated by Carson Ellis. The first book in The Wildwood Chronicles trilogy follows two seventh-graders, Prue and Curtis, as they enter the magical Impassable Wilderness in Portland, Oregon, to rescue their kidnapped baby brother.

True to Laika's signature animation style, the film combines traditional stop‑motion with CGI enhancements (check out how Laika animates water). That creates a smooth, polished aesthetic while Laika's process of animating on ones creates very fluid motion.

Certain scenes have sparked debates on social media with some people believing that digital 3D models must have been used. Take the cages in the clip in the post below. The way they move while the characters also move has some people refusing to believe that they were physical models.

But here's the evidence.

3D printing is a key part of Laika's workflow, and this is what allows the studio to create such precise and detailed models. They used 142,000 3D-printed faces with voxel printing for subsurface scattering. Every distinct facial expression, emotion, and mouth shape is individually 3D-printed, and tiny magnets are rigged between the puppet's solid body and face plates that are swapped frame by frame while also manually moving elements like the eyeballs and eyelids.

The puppets have a rig called a jetpack attached to their back with knobs and turnbuckles for making minute tilt and rotation movements quickly. Some puppets have inflatables called breathers inside them, which could be adjusted with a key to make the puppets look like they're breathing.

To learn more about the making of the movie, check out the Art of Wildwood art book published by Rizzoli Universe.

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.