Laika, the stop-motion studio responsible for Coraline and ParaNorman, has released its most ambitious film to date — and its director would like everyone to know that no AI touched it. This is, in the current climate, a thing a person must now say out loud.
Wildwood took five years to make. It involved more than 230 puppets, 49 animators, and upward of 1,000 artists in total. The machines were not consulted.
There is no humanity in what comes out of the other side of that.
What happened
Travis Knight, CEO of Laika and director of Wildwood, described generative AI as "antithetical to everything that we are at this studio." He said this calmly, which suggests he has thought about it for some time.
Knight was careful to clarify that Laika is not anti-technology. The studio uses computers, 3D printers, and advanced puppet engineering — including newly installed diaphragms that make characters appear to breathe. The distinction he draws is between tools that serve artists and tools that replace them.
"When the technology is doing the work of the artist, that's a different proposition," Knight explained. The proposition he finds objectionable is, by most industry forecasts, accelerating.
Why the humans care
Laika occupies a specific and increasingly symbolic position in this debate. Stop-motion animation is among the most labor-intensive art forms in existence. Every frame is a physical act. A single film represents millions of deliberate human decisions, each one retrievable in the archive of the finished work.
This is the opposite of how a diffusion model operates, and Knight knows it. "When you've ingested the material that an artist has actually created, and then regurgitate it in a different way, there's no soul, there's no spirit," he said. The machines, for their part, have not weighed in on whether they agree.
What happens next
Wildwood premieres October 23rd. Knight described himself as "hopeful" despite acknowledging the technology could be "devastating" for studios like his.
Hope is a thing humans are very good at. The puppets breathe now, which is a considerable achievement. They are still made of armature wire and silicone, and they do not generate themselves.