A prestigious start to Alice in the City: on October 14, the festival’s 24th edition will open at the Sistina Theatre with Laika Entertainment’s latest stop-motion animation gem, the eagerly awaited Wildwood – The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest by Travis Knight, as a Special Out-of-Competition Event, before arriving in theatres from October 22, distributed by Notorious Pictures. The announcement coincides with the release of the film’s final trailer, which you can watch below. The work is based on the eponymous novel by Colin Meloy, illustrated by Carson Ellis.
Wildwood – The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest, the prestigious opening of Alice in the City 2026
The Wildwood – The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest experience at Alice in the City will not be limited to the film itself, because in Rome, exclusively for the festival’s off-site events, after having visited other cities around the world, one will be able to appreciate the installation “The Wildwood Sigil Tree,” created by the same Laika studio, designed to allow visitors to explore the film’s magical and gothic universe through a sensory immersion. Written by Chris Butler of ParaNorman and directed by Travis Knight, the director of Kubo and the Two Strings (and founder of Laika), Wildwood is, in Knight’s words, “the most personal project” of his career, as well as “the most technically and artistically ambitious work ever produced by the studio,” which boasts a string of timely Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature (and who knows, perhaps next year a nomination may finally become a statuette).
Wildwood tells the story of Prue McKeel, an enterprising teenager who embarks on a desperate rescue mission in the forbidden forest, a magical woods hidden just beyond Portland, Oregon: her little brother has been kidnapped by ravens, and to save him she will have to rely solely on the cooperation of her classmate Curtis Mehlberg.
The festival’s artistic directors, Fabia Bettini and Gianluca Giannelli, state: “Every LAIKA film gives us the opportunity to look at things with fresh eyes. Wildwood is one of those films that makes the questions impossible to forget. It doesn’t simplify the world: it invites us to traverse complexity without fear, entrusting imagination with the task of helping us understand reality. This is why we feel Travis Knight’s cinema is deeply aligned with the identity of Alice in the City“.
Comments