Wildwood: The Best Animated Film of 2026—and the Human Brilliance Behind It

Hero art: official Wildwood promotional artwork courtesy of LAIKA. Editorial title treatment by Otherworlds Inc. Included for identification and commentary.

LAIKA has made something extraordinary. The care behind it deserves recognition, and the people capable of creating work like this deserve our support.

For me, Wildwood is the best animated film of 2026.

The scale and care of this film are unlike anything I have seen in years. There is ambition in it, certainly, but there is also an extraordinary willingness to follow that ambition through the slow, difficult work of making it real. I want people to see it. I want the artists responsible for it to know that their work has reached someone.

And I want us to think about what we are supporting when we choose to show up for a film like this.

A finished world can make its own creation disappear. We accept the forest, the movement, the expression. We feel something and follow the story. Behind that ease are people who spent part of their lives deciding how a world should look, how a body should move, and how much feeling a small gesture could carry.

Wildwood deserves to be celebrated as a feat of human creativity. At a time when so much attention is being given to replacing creative labor, I think we should be paying considerably more attention to what people are still capable of making.

A World Someone Had to Build

Directed by Travis Knight and written by Chris Butler, Wildwood adapts the book by Colin Meloy, illustrated by Carson Ellis. Its story follows Prue McKeel into the Impassable Wilderness after crows take her baby brother. Her classmate Curtis joins her in a forest whose beauty exists alongside competing powers and very real danger. Those are the foundations of the adventure; the work of making that forest believable belongs to an enormous collaboration.

LAIKA’s artists have to consider both the appearance of a character and the physical demands of performing with it. A puppet must allow an animator to communicate intention. Its construction affects what the artist can ask of it, and how precisely that request can be made.

In Cartoon Brew’s studio visit, the filmmakers describe approximately 142,000 printed faces created for the production. Brian McLean, LAIKA’s director of rapid prototyping, explains the artist handling and finishing involved. That number matters because of the performances it helps make possible: the small differences through which a face begins to communicate.

A slight change can carry a great deal. In animation, where every movement must be chosen, a pause has to be made as deliberately as an action. Attention is part of the performance.

That is why I want the conversation to extend beyond the studio’s name. Animation supervisors, fabricators, designers, costume artists, cinematographers, and visual-effects artists contribute different kinds of judgment. The finished film asks us to believe in one world; its makers have to bring their separate decisions into agreement.

We should remember that collaboration when we call the result beautiful.

The Human Being at the Center of the Tools

LAIKA’s approach gives us a useful way to speak clearly about technology. Its artists work with computers, digital models, printing systems, and visual effects. Those tools belong in the account of its craftsmanship.

Fraunhofer IGD describes its contribution to the facial-animation pipeline: software that turns LAIKA’s digital models into data for precisely colored physical prints. A digital process becomes part of a puppet an animator can work with. The artistic choices continue across the tools.

That distinction matters to me. Human-made art includes the work of digital artists. Modeling, rigging, lighting, compositing, and animation are creative disciplines, and their practitioners deserve recognition alongside the people working directly with physical materials.

Speaking to Variety, Knight put his concern plainly:

“Technology is not useful when it takes the place of the artist.”

His remarks address generative AI supplanting the person doing the creative work. I share that concern. I want artists to have powerful tools, opportunities to learn, and the means to develop their voices. I also want them to remain the people making the decisions that give the work its identity.

A person brings more than an ability to produce an image. They bring the things they have noticed, the mistakes that changed their approach, the people they remember, and the particular questions they cannot leave alone. Their choices come from a life.

When we value a finished work, I believe that life deserves a place in the conversation.

Beauty With Something at Stake

Craftsmanship gives this argument substance, but the film also needs to give us a reason to care about the world being made.

Prue enters the forest because someone she loves needs her. That simple emotional purpose gives the adventure a human scale. However large the conflict becomes, its beginning is a relationship.

The official synopsis describes figures driven by grief and ambition. Those forces make an important question available to the story: what happens when the intensity of someone’s feelings becomes their justification for what they do to others?

Love creates responsibilities. Grief can make those responsibilities harder to see. A fantasy can give such feelings enormous physical form while leaving their human origins recognizable. The forest may be impossible; the desire to protect someone, or the fear of losing them, is familiar.

This is part of what I value in ambitious animation. It can make an imagined world feel emotionally close without making it small. It can ask us to care across unfamiliar bodies, impossible places, and experiences beyond our own.

My praise is enthusiastic, and it is also personal. There are critics who admire the film’s craft while finding its storytelling crowded; Sight and Sound makes that distinction. I do not need every viewer to reach my conclusion. I do want people to encounter the work and make room for what it offers.

Children Deserve Stories Worth Talking About

I also believe the lessons here are worth sharing with children who are ready for this kind of story.

There is value in giving young people something more substantial to discuss than whether a character won. What did caring for someone require? What happens when fear guides a decision? How do we recognize the point at which someone’s pain begins to harm other people?

Those questions can continue after a film ends. An adult can listen to what a child noticed, explain what confused them, and make room for a response that differs from their own. The conversation becomes part of the experience.

Animation can hold beauty and danger in the same frame. Young audiences are capable of meaningful engagement with difficult feelings, and I appreciate stories that give those feelings weight. Readiness still matters. A film can offer something valuable without being appropriate for every child at the same moment in their life.

There is another lesson worth showing them, too: people made this. Artists learned how to build, move, light, and photograph things until an audience could believe they were alive. Let children see some of that process. Let them discover that wonder can be something they learn to create.

Why We Are Fighting for This at Otherworlds

At Otherworlds Inc., we are fighting to keep our art and animation made by people, without generative AI taking their place.

I know what it asks of a team to build a world that does not exist yet: time, revision, patience, and the means to return tomorrow. A creative commitment has practical consequences. Someone needs the space to learn, to solve the difficult part, to come back to a drawing and make a better choice.

When I think about Lunora, I think about the people giving that world form, including Kev Liew and Sierra Ashevaili Rottman. Their work carries attention that belongs to them. I want our readers to recognize that there are people behind these pages, with skills and perspectives worth supporting.

We need people who value that work to stand beside it. Buy a book when you can. See the film. Share a release, recommend a story, remember an artist’s name. These things help people keep creating.

I want the worlds we leave behind to carry something of the lives that made them. And I want the people making them to have a future, too.

Give the Work Somewhere to Go

Appreciation becomes more useful when it reaches the people doing the work.

A ticket supports a release. A recommendation can bring someone to a film they would otherwise miss. Sharing an official behind-the-scenes feature can help another viewer recognize a craft they had never considered. Crediting an artist gives someone a name to follow and a body of work to discover.

Support does not have to become a financial test of anyone’s sincerity. People have different means. Thoughtful attention, honest recommendations, and respect for an artist’s credit also matter.

For those of us who can purchase the work we care about, there is an opportunity to act on what we say we value. We can help give ambitious art an audience while its creators are still here to see it.

I want a future in which people can spend years learning difficult skills and find a place to use them. I want young artists to see a possible life ahead of them. I want the patience, imagination, and collaboration behind a film like Wildwood to remain something studios have reason to pursue.

That future needs people willing to make the work. It also needs people willing to meet it.

Go see Wildwood. Give its world your attention. Stay for the names of the people who made it. If it moves you, tell someone why.

LAIKA has done something extraordinary. Let us make sure the people behind it know we noticed.

Find Wildwood tickets and official film information →

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