NEW YORK — Travis Knight, the chief executive of the stop-motion animation studio Laika, wasn’t prepared for the response to the teaser for his new film, Wildwood.Almost immediately, it went viral. The early trailer rapidly gained more than 90 million views on YouTube, galvanised by people awed by the apparent scale and emotional depth of Laika’s most ambitious film yet. Sample comment: “AI is the future. Laika: Hold my meticulously handcrafted stop motion beer.””People that I worked with — hardened industry folks with wizened black husks of hearts — were sending me text messages: ‘Jesus Christ, your trailer just made me cry,’” Knight says, chuckling.Why did Knight’s strange, indie stop-motion animated movie resonate so strongly?”The making of the art leaves fingerprints on the art,” Knight surmises. “And I think people feel that.”There’s no shortage of people proclaiming that AI is the future. There are significantly fewer proselytizing about stop-motion animation’s assured destiny.
Leave a Reply