AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In the forests of Portland, Oregon, beneath the canopy of trees, there lies magic. Maybe you don't believe that. Neither did Prue McKeel, the girl at the heart of the new stop-motion animated movie "Wildwood."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WILDWOOD")
PEYTON ELIZABETH LEE: (As Prue McKeel) You witches and magic and talking animals - I stopped believing in this stuff a long time ago.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) And yet, here you are. You're so intent on seeing no magic in the world that you miss it.
RASCOE: The movie is based on a book series of the same name by Colin Meloy. Laika Studios, the company behind the beloved stop-motion classics "Paranorman" and "Coraline," brought the book to life. Travis Knight directed the movie, and he joins us now from New York. Welcome.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: Hey, Ayesha. Great to be here.
RASCOE: Let's talk about the main character in this movie, Prue McKeel. She's barely a teen, but she seems so grown-up. She's taking care of her baby brother, Mac. We see her at a coffee shop taking a straight shot of espresso, and she tells another kid, Curtis...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WILDWOOD")
LEE: (As Prue McKeel) I'm not a kid. I have zero interest in - weird.
JACOB TREMBLAY: (As Curtis Mehlberg) Yeah, sure. Weird.
RASCOE: She's so young, but she's already so grown-up. Why is that?
KNIGHT: Well, I think Prue is like a lot of teens, certainly that I know. You know, as the father of four, I've seen kids go through this experience, and, you know, in our modern world, kids are growing up faster than ever. Prue's a - she's kind of a typical Portland kid. I'm from Portland. Colin Meloy, who wrote the book - he's a Portlander. So she feels to me like an honest portrayal of a Portland kid.
And like so many teenagers at that age, you know, they're trying to figure out the world. It's a maturation metaphor. It's about the Rubicon that we cross as we move from childhood to adulthood and the loss of innocence, the things we leave behind and the things we gain along the way.
RASCOE: Yeah. You said you grew up in Portland. When you were a kid there, did you ever think there was something lurking behind the trees or magical woods or anything?
KNIGHT: Well, Portland's a weird place. I think most people recognize that. And one of the things that's cool about Portland is that there is wilderness, essentially, on every side of Portland. And so, you know, growing up there, the forest was essentially right outside my back door. And so I spent a lot of my childhood exploring those forests.
But one of the things about forests is that, you know, when the sun starts to set and it gets a little darker and you're hearing, you know, rustling in the leaves and you're hearing twigs snap, it can be a scary place. It can be a place of magic and wonder and discovery, but it can also be pretty frightening.
RASCOE: A murder of crows takes Prue's brother Mac into the forest with these various magical societies. You may not know this, Travis, but I do not like birds, so I knew...
KNIGHT: (Laughter).
RASCOE: ...That the crows were evil. I felt it.
KNIGHT: They're bad news.
RASCOE: I felt that they were bad news. But in this magical forest, there are some good birds. We'll say that.
KNIGHT: Yeah.
RASCOE: And there's some murderous coyotes, and there's this evil governess. And a lot of these groups are kind of, like, against each other until they need to work together. Tell us more about this society.
KNIGHT: Well, one of the things that we definitely want to capture as Prue and Curtis enter this, quote-unquote, "fantasy land" is that this is a society that has history and traditions, and it has conflict. We want it to have a sense that there was a whole kind of universe within this place that existed well before we arrived within it.
Building a fantasy world is a great joy. I mean, one of the things I love about animation is the worldbuilding aspect. You start with absolutely nothing, and then everything you see on screen, it's a creative choice. It's an artistic choice - every blade of grass to every character's appearance to every location to the costumes that they're wearing. And it allows you to build in a history that exists, even if it's an imaginary one.
RASCOE: This is a fantasy world, and it's animated, but there are a lot of dark themes in this movie. Here's Prue's father giving us a hint that this isn't, like, a light-hearted fantasy story.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WILDWOOD")
JAKE JOHNSON: (As Mr. McKeel) There are places in the world that people were never meant to go...
(SOUNDBITE OF GROWLING)
JOHNSON: (As Mr. McKeel) ...Dark forests where the trees hide darker secrets.
RASCOE: This is Laika's first PG-13 movie. Why make that decision?
KNIGHT: I was not surprised when they deemed this film a PG-13 film. I felt like that that's actually appropriate for what the film is. For me, that doesn't necessarily mean that the film is not appropriate for kids. It just means that there is more intensity to this film than you might expect in a traditional animated film. There is great beauty and joy and humor and light within the film, but we earn that by going through some dark places.
And I think a lot of modern cinema tends to sanitize these things and, in fact, speak down to young people. Young people have complex inner lives, just like we do. They know what it's like to be afraid. They know what it's like to be alone and to feel powerless and to have people that they love taken from them.
RASCOE: The villain in this film - or antagonist, maybe, is a better way to say it - is a grieving mother. And you feel for her, and there's this tension in the movie about what people are willing to do for those they love, when they should let go. The movie does not provide clear answers on that letting go question.
KNIGHT: It's complicated, for sure. You know, Alexandra, who is the main force of antagonism within the film - she is not a standard, quote-unquote, "villain." What drives her is not revenge. It's not power. This is a woman who has been shattered by grief, and it's what she will do to try to reshape the world around that and what she will do to reclaim the thing that she lost, that she should not have lost.
She does terrible, terrible things as a consequence of that. But I think we can all understand why she does it. And I think there's also an element where we could see, if we were put in that position ourselves, we might do the same thing.
RASCOE: Stop-motion is very hands-on. It takes a lot of patience. In the age of AI, where so much - you can just generate it with a prompt - why are art forms like stop-motion persisting?
KNIGHT: You know, working in stop-motion, it is antithetical to all the technological advances that we've seen in our modern society. And what I would argue is that there is something that is special and something that is precious in things that are made by hand. And when you look at a stop-motion film, what you are seeing is the accumulated effort of time and care and devotion of this extraordinary team of artists and craftspeople and technicians who are bringing things to life with their hands.
Things are rapidly moving in one direction with the advancements of artificial intelligence. You know, on some level, making a film in stop-motion is a quiet act of rebellion against that. But I also think that it represents the human touch, and I think that is something that is precious, and I think it's something that we cannot lose, and it deserves to be preserved.
RASCOE: That's Travis Knight. He directed the new stop-motion adaptation of the story "Wildwood." Thank you so much for joining us.
KNIGHT: Thanks, Ayesha. I had a great time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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