Laika has spent 20 years building up to Wildwood

Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surprised by just how much work went into these movies.

“When I started I thought it was one thing, and then I quickly found out that it was another thing,” Deschanel says. “It was much more complicated than I expected.” Wildwood has been a long time coming. Laika CEO Travis Knight originally optioned the rights for the book of the same