WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE UNIPIPER IS IN LAIKA'S NEXT MOVIE???
HANG ON LET ME EXPLAIN
Ok so The Annecy Film Festival in France started this month and Travis Knight (CEO of LAIKA and director of their upcoming film, Wildwood) Is giving presentations and showing the audience exclusive sneak peaks of the film and I just found a French news article giving detailed descriptions of the clips that were shown. Here are the translations (there seem to be a few errors, but bear with me!!);
"First a chase through the streets of Portland. It all starts with Prue walking his little brother through the city. The film plays with all the clichΓ©s of the indie city, populated by creative alters, and kindly bobos. The post-hippie spirit floats on the sequence: a coffee shop, bikes everywhere, and a man in Darth Vader who goes into a unicycle (βhe really exists, heβs a local celebrity,β Knight swears). Then comes the time of the park. Crows mysteriously gather on children's games (unable not to think about Hitchcock's Birds), rush to little Mac and win in the air. Prue then jumps on his bike and starts zigzagging between cars and buses to the forest border. Cut. Crazy fluidity (we forget all the time that they are animated puppets image by image), impressive play of light, sense of editing and amazing space... It's really cinema."
"The second sequence is more classic. Curtis, separated from Prue, is collected by Alexandra in a large room with a heroic fantasy atmosphere. The antagonist talks to the kid, for a long time, and over the course of the discussion we understand that she lost her son. The scene is of a mild, almost maternal sweetness, and that's all the trap it sets for Curtis. This is where Septimus, the rat of the woods, both companion and accomplice of the young hero appears in the novel of Meloy. A puppet so tiny that it fits on the tip of her finger, that Laika's craftsmen compare to a human hair when she escapes their hands. The rat and the boy sniff out, gauge each other. It summarizes the whole project: precision, humor, love of detail, and crazy belief that a craft gesture can still overturn a room."
"Last video. Prue is on the back of a giant eagle. The General, doubled in VO by Angela Bassett, is 86 cm long, 106 cm wide, 9 000 feathers laid one by one. The camera takes off, crosses the forest, and switches to a staggering action scene. The ravens melt in dive on the raptor, wolves appear on the ground to leap on its legs, the sky is torn apart. Wide-staging, rhythm held, astounding scale effects. At this moment, we understand what Knight means when he repeats that Prue is βas epic as The Lord of the Rings.β No one has ever filmed an air fight like that in stop-motion."
First of all this is already looking to be the most Portland film to ever Portland. Second, if you've been following LAIKA stuff as closely as I have, the studio itself has an in-house coffee shop called 'Dripster's', and it has been mentioned that it is named after a location that appears in Wildwood. So I'm guessing it will appear in this mini-Portland.
Third, this is not how Curtis and Septimus meet in the book but that's not a big deal.
Last but not least, a magazine article came out in 2024 in which Travis Knight calls 'an aerial dogfight' in the film as 'putting everything else he's ever done to shame' and I couldn't be more hyped.
In a world where anything is possible through animation, it truly uplifts my spirit to know that some of the coolest visuals we'll ever see were not created by AI, but by the blood and bones of hands of people who actually give a damn.
