The new fantasy film “Wildwood” arrived in theaters October 23 with an unusually tangible world behind its talking animals and forest adventures: puppets dressed in miniature garments engineered to move one frame at a time.
Directed by Travis Knight and written by Chris Butler, the Laika production adapts Colin Meloy’s novel, illustrated by Carson Ellis. The story follows Prue into a hidden Pacific Northwest forest after crows abduct her younger brother.
Costume designer Deborah Cook developed more than 200 pieces for the film, Smithsonian magazine reported in an interview published on release day. The challenge was to make clothing communicate character while remaining workable at puppet scale.
Prue’s clothes change as the journey unfolds. Cook told Smithsonian that her initially buttoned-up appearance gives way to boots, tied-back hair and more practical clothing as the character becomes less guarded and more prepared for the forest.
Even an apparently ordinary coat required specialized manufacturing. Cook said the team needed 44 versions of Prue’s blue coat, plus replacement parts, and used programmed embroidery to reproduce a textured fabric consistently across the copies.
Armor presented a different problem: it had to look like metal while remaining flexible enough to animate. Cook described using printed materials with metallic pigment and adding movable backing so the pieces could appear to carry weight under the camera’s lighting.
InStyle’s separate visit to the costume department described thread used as shoelaces, tiny tools and internal wires that help garments move. Reinforced clothing also limits “chatter,” the distracting changes that can occur when objects shift inconsistently between frames.
The release brings a long-running project to theaters through Fathom Entertainment, with FilmNation handling international sales. The accounts of the production reveal how much of the film’s visual storytelling depends on repeatable physical work, from the shape of a coat to the way its sleeve bends.