It is no exaggeration to say that Wildwood: The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest will enter film history as one of the most monumentally realized first-time films in cinema: in theaters from October 22, the immense production effort by Laika Entertainment was presented to us a few days ago at Alice in the City, within the framework of the Rome Film Festival, by its character designer Thibault Leclercq. His role spans from preproduction to the creation of the puppets, laying the groundwork for the magic that will come to life on screen. He walked us through this journey and added important reflections on AI, which could not be farther from Wildwood. The film follows the journey of the girl Prue in a fairy-tale forest, accompanied by her friend Curtis, as they seek to rescue her kidnapped brother, taken by a flock of ravens and by a threatening Widow Governor.
Wildwood, la genesi dei personaggi raccontata dal character designer Thibault Leclercq
The character designer Thibault Leclercq poured his soul into the vast cast of characters that populate the film’s varied, whimsical yet menacing fairy-tale world of Wildwood: The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest by Travis Knight, Laika Entertainment’s latest opus—one might say of the stop-motion craft’s apex—and after this film, perhaps the world leader in a field so ancient. If he naturally sketched the main figures like Prue and Curtis for months, Leclercq explains that the film’s enormous cast compelled a precise definition of the film’s “DNA,” a rationalized guide for the style to be adopted: it was essential to allow his collaborators to conceive the other characters without straying too far from his spirit. Not an easy feat, because detail is everything for Laika: “We never spare a detail.” The cast had to feel real and tangible, because they would literally become so on set: skin, outfits, fabrics, feathers, fur. They started from the Carson Ellis illustrations for the original book, aiming to capture their immediacy; to this end, he personally prefers to begin with pencil drawings, because “with Photoshop I get lost in the detail, the temptation to zoom is too strong, I don’t want to lose the impact of the whole figure.” The spirit of his sketches and of those original illustrations reappears in the end credits, which he valued precisely to organically recapitulate the visual coherence of Wildwood’s world, from the book to the film. He worked closely with Mike Defeo, chief sculptor, for the next step: what would his drawings look like occupying space? This is a preliminary phase before crafting the actual puppets, because the three-dimensional test is conducted this way, with statues. It shouldn’t be underestimated that the puppet will be framed from every angle, up to close-ups: one must begin imagining this physical, tangible render after the ideal 2D image. The next step is defining the materials and colors, and in Prue’s case they even shift throughout the story to reflect her emotional evolution, color-wise. At this point comes the final phase, before filming: transforming all these studies and tests into the articulated puppets for stop-motion, including their costumes, often enriched with an aging pass, a process of aging clothing and surfaces so the models don’t look like they just came off a factory line. The entire process requires Leclercq’s supervision to prevent the many hands involved from losing the original drawing’s intent: easy with stop-motion, where the need to physically build the characters entails continual decisions for every tiny detail (such as the hair, which bears the growing discomfort of Prue, scene by scene). “This film is the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done,” he tells us. He himself spent years following the design process and then the creation of the characters, and Laika had never before achieved such a number of articulated models.
Wildwood, un film anti-Intelligenza Artificiale, ma inevitabilmente, non per antagonismo
It is worth isolating how Leclercq answered when asked how he sees the use of Artificial Intelligence in his work: “It’s interesting, because for me it’s hard to relate to AI—at least as it is now, with generative AI. Because it focuses on the result. It’s a tool, a technology aimed at delivering a finished product on the fly. You ask and you get something completed in fairly quick time. As an artist I really find it difficult to relate to such a thing, because I believe every artist, and to be honest every human being deep down, is a creator; we focus on the process. I am a designer not because I enjoy pretty drawings, I design because I like to draw. That’s why I became a character designer. I work in cinema not because I love watching films, of course I like them, but if that were the only reason I would have stayed just a film buff. I make films because I like making films. If you remove that active part from the equation and I receive the finished film straight away, I become merely a client, I’m not the one making it. This thing doesn’t bring me joy. I love the creative process, the difference is that I enjoy the creative process as much as the finished product. And you can see it in the behind-the-scenes, you can see it in the art behind it. Every artist loves to work and solve very complex challenges to make that tree look alive, building leaf after leaf. In my view that love and attention to detail, that art, every human perceives on screen. It reconnects you to childhood, to the true life experience you cannot feel if you only receive something finished and ready. It may be well-made, but it’s a product of AI. Perhaps I sound philosophical because I think it touches us all: I don’t believe that we, as human beings, will be happier by doing less and getting more all the time. I don’t believe that efficiency or comfort brings joy, even if a basic degree of comfort is needed. I believe that we are happy with a purpose, a goal, a conquest. And when you have to make a film like this, with all these characters, these environments and details, with such a complex story, you have to face countless challenges for years. Your aim is to tell a story and, in the end, you do it: that’s a satisfaction you will never obtain if you just see the result after hitting a button. I hope I’ve explained myself.”
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