“16 Years”: Travis Knight Reflects on Love, Loss and the Making of Wildwood at AFI FEST

Reporting from the TCL Chinese Theatre, Hollywood

Travis Knight had a Jay-Z entrance planned. That was the joke, anyway. Instead, LAIKA’s President and CEO walked out to a lectern at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Wednesday night, noted that his studio had spent the better part of two decades making a movie only to premiere it in Los Angeles while it was, in his words, pissing rain outside, and then introduced himself the way he said nobody should.

“I am Travis Knight,” he told the opening-night crowd of the 40th AFI FEST, “and I make stop-motion movies.”

He acknowledged it sounded like the first line at an addiction-recovery meeting, and said the similarities were striking: the obsessive behavior, the financial ruin, the strain on loved ones, the repeated promises that this is the last time. He had admitted he had a problem, he said. That was the first step. He had no intention of taking any of the others.

For the next twenty minutes, the room was his. What began as a very good stand-up set about the absurdity of his life’s work turned, slowly and without warning, into one of the most vulnerable things I have heard a filmmaker say from a festival stage.

Sixteen years

Knight’s definition of stop-motion was the practical one. You build thousands upon thousands of tiny things, put them on a handmade set under lights, move them a microscopic distance, take a picture, and repeat — until either a movie emerges or society collapses, whichever comes first. With Wildwood, he said, it could have gone either way, because LAIKA has been working on it for 16 years.

He wanted the audience to feel how long that is. When work began, he said, Barack Obama was a first-term president, Instagram was brand new, Netflix was something that came in the mail, and Twitter still seemed like it might be fun. There were bookstores everywhere — enormous buildings filled entirely with books, if you can imagine such a reckless use of commercial real estate. Artificial intelligence was mostly just trying to kill Sigourney Weaver. The world was young then, he said, and somewhere in Portland, Oregon, a group of otherwise well-adjusted adults began a stop-motion movie they confidently assumed would be finished within the natural lifespan of everyone involved.

If blame was to be assigned — and he was happy to assign it — it began with Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, the author and illustrator whose Wildwood novel imagined a wilderness at the edge of Portland filled with warring kingdoms, impossible beauty, terrible danger and magic woven through all of it. And then, Knight said, they gave a girl a reason to go in: someone she loved needed her. “That is always enough.”

Knight grew up in Portland. He said he spent years of his childhood in those woods, convinced that if he went far enough and bravely enough, the magic might make room for him. Meloy and Ellis had conjured the place he always wanted to go. A sensible person, he said, would have handed people the book. Instead, he gathered hundreds of world-class artists and announced they were making Wildwood — and the universe, he said, smiled a knowing smile and told him: fine, but first you must suffer beautifully.

He thanked Meloy and Ellis directly for their faith and generosity. It is no small thing, he said, to hand over something you love and watch other people approach it with power tools.

Giving life to things that cannot feel

The funniest part of the speech ended there, and the part that explained LAIKA began.

At LAIKA, Knight said, they make films out of things that do not know they are alive: wood, metal, fabric, silicone. Metal does not know it is frightened. Fabric does not know it is wearing a secret. Silicone does not know it has lost someone. Left alone, those materials will sit there forever. They will not confess or tremble, fall in love or make a terrible choice or try to save a brother. An artist persuades them otherwise.

He described how: a tiny adjustment of the eyes; a shoulder sagging beneath the weight of something that has never been said out loud; a hand reaching for another hand and then stopping, because wanting comfort and accepting it are two very different things. And then, suddenly, that assemblage of steel and silicone and fabric is no longer an object. It is a someone. You know they are afraid. You know who they are pretending not to be. You know they are trying very hard to be brave because someone they love needs them to be.

That, Knight said, is what still astonishes him: someone puts a little of their own life into something that has never lived, and later, a stranger sitting in the dark recognizes it. He has spent his whole life doing this one painstaking frame at a time, he said, and he still does not know why it works. The best things keep some of their mystery.

He asked everyone who worked on Wildwood to stand. A noticeable portion of the theater rose. He thanked them for their patience and passion and invention, for everything he asked them to make and for the beautiful things they made that he did not know enough to ask for. They had given the movie a part of their lives, he said, and there was no way to thank someone for that, except to spend the rest of his own treasuring it.

He thanked the families who shared those years, who are in the film in ways no credit can account for, and his sons, who were in the audience. Nothing he has been lucky enough to do in this life, he said, has meant more than being their dad. And he thanked his wife — his muse, his love, his life — for keeping a place for him, for building a life worth living while he was building an imaginary one. She had always been his way home.

Grief is not impressed with architecture

Sixteen years, Knight said, is a small phrase. You can say it quickly. You cannot live it quickly.

While they were making this film, life went on, because life is inconsiderate that way. Children were born and grew. Families changed. There were birthdays and illnesses, celebrations and worries, remarkable days and ordinary ones that did not announce themselves as precious until later. And there were people they loved who were lost along the way.

He named them. He was missing his brother, he said — his parents’ son. He and his wife were missing her brother, whom he called his other brother. And they were missing their nephew, who, if Knight were somehow lucky enough to look out and see his face in the crowd, would have turned 13 years old that night.

He had tried, he said, to find a wiser thing to say, something more elegant, with better architecture. But grief is not impressed with architecture. He wished they were there. He wished he could sit beside them when the lights went down, look away from the screen and watch their faces instead. He wished they could all go somewhere afterward and talk — about the movie, or about something he did that annoyed them, or about how long he had gone on with this stupid speech. Or about nothing at all. That, he said, is one of grief’s great cruelties: you don’t only miss the grand moments. You miss the ones that didn’t matter, the ones that didn’t have to matter because you believed there would be more of them.

Then he connected it to the film, carefully. When he first came to Wildwood, he said, he was drawn to the adventure: a girl thrown into a world she does not understand who discovers she has more courage than she knew. Over the years, he came to understand the grief inside the story more deeply — the longing for someone you cannot reach, the refusal at the heart of it, the insistence that there must be one more path, one more door, one more bargain, one more impossible thing that might bring them back, or buy just a little more time than we were given. He wished, he said, that he had understood that less well.

But he also came to understand the story’s kindness: the unexpected friendships, the small mercies, the people who stand beside each other even when they cannot fix what has been broken, and the courage it takes to love someone in a world that will not let you keep them forever. They needed that courage to make the movie, he said. There were days when another person’s hope carried the room. Those moments are in the frames. You won’t see them, but they’re there — in the leaves, in the hands that reach and the hands they touch.

What I saw in the film

I’ll keep this spoiler-light, because the movie deserves to be met on its own terms. But having heard that speech and then watched Wildwood, I can say the two are talking to each other.

The story’s antagonist is a mother and a wife who has lost both her son and her husband, and the film takes her grief seriously enough that I found myself aching for her even as the stakes turned against her. Wildwood asks how far a parent’s love can go when it collides with a loss that will not be undone, and it does not pretend the answer is simple. Knight did not say any particular loss shaped any particular character, and I’m not going to claim it for him. What he said was that over 16 years he came to understand the grief in this story better than he wished he did — and that understanding is on the screen.

The audience completes the film

For years, Knight said, he watched Wildwood in bits and pieces: a frame here, a puppet there, a tiny face being sculpted, a gesture, a shot, a scene, always surrounded by people asking how to make it better. For as long as they were making it, they were missing one crucial thing. A film is forever incomplete, he said, until it finds someone to experience it. And so, after all this time, the film was finally done — because of the people in that room.

They would bring things into the woods that the filmmakers could never have put there, he told them: their memories, their childhoods, their fears, the people they love and the people they miss. Perhaps someone would be sitting beside them whose hand they could reach for when the lights went down. Perhaps there was someone whose hand they wished they could hold.

Stories don’t bring back the people we’ve lost, Knight said. But they make a room where their memory can sit with us. They make a path through the woods and say: come in. You were not the only one who has been afraid. You were not the only one who was loved. You are not the only one who has lost someone and is still, somehow, walking.

What a wonderful reason, he said, to make anything.

Then he thanked the audience for making space in their lives for this story, for walking with LAIKA into these woods, and said the words he has presumably been waiting 16 years to say: “Welcome to Wildwood.”

The lights went down. Sixteen years of artists had built a world. On Wednesday night, the rest of us finally walked into it.

Wildwood opens in theaters nationwide Friday, October 23 via Fathom Entertainment. Read our AFI FEST opening-night report and follow all of our coverage at the AFI FEST 2026 hub.