Travis Knight on WILDWOOD final battle
by Anjali Filmi: Laika
The final battle in WILDWOOD is the hardest sequence LAIKA has ever put together, per Travis Knight. His reasoning: it demanded every single technique they had. Hand-drawn animation, stop-motion and CG all share the frame, and Knight says the finished thing is something to behold.
Transcript (en)
It is the final battle, the culmination of everything. It was by far the hardest thing that we've ever done in our entire history. I knew it was going to be the most challenging because of the combination of different things. There are hundreds of characters. It's this huge kinetic battle with all this insane cinematography. And there's fire and explosions and battle choreography. It was really the most challenging thing we've ever taken on. And it required us to use every single technique and technology that we've developed over the 20 years we've been in existence. It's a combination of hand-drawn animation, of stop-motion animation, of CG animation, and it really is something to behold when you realize how it's done. But in the end, we don't really want people to think about how it's done. Hopefully there's appreciation for it, but in the end we want people to be enveloped in the story and the emotion of the story. And that's the thing I'm most proud of, and that's the thing that we really want people to feel.
