Where fairy tales meet fantasy
Fantasy often constructs a complete world from the ground up. Fairy tales usually begin somewhere recognisable: a forest outside a village, an unsettling creature beside the road or a bird carrying an impossible secret. For The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis, that contrast is central to understanding Wildwood.
The husband-and-wife creative team first built Wildwood as a novel and illustrated world. Laika has now adapted it into a stop-motion animated film, setting its fantastical adventure in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond a familiar bridge lies a hidden wilderness, accessible only to people with the right spirit.
Building a fairy tale from older stories
Meloy says the project deliberately reached back towards early folklore and traditional fairy-tale patterns. He acknowledges that a modern film of this kind will inevitably be described as fantasy, but the creative goal from the beginning was to make a fairy tale.
For Meloy, fairy tales are the foundation beneath much of modern fantasy. Writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis drew on the language and imagery of older tales while creating their own mythologies. Ellis makes a similar distinction: the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen already feel embedded in the culture, so the challenge is to make those familiar foundations feel vivid again.
Our arcade blog regularly explores the same relationship between established folklore, visual design and new forms of entertainment.
A darker kind of children’s adventure
Wildwood begins with a particularly unsettling piece of folklore: crows kidnapping a baby, an image Meloy connects with Irish mythology. Director Travis Knight wanted the film to embrace the eerie and frightening side of children’s storytelling, drawing inspiration from Watership Down, The Dark Crystal and The Secret of NIMH—films Meloy admires.
Those works trusted younger audiences to confront danger, grief and uncertainty rather than smoothing away every disturbing detail. Wildwood follows that tradition and has received a relatively unusual PG-13 rating for an animated film.
Portland’s forest becomes an enchanted world
The story unfolds in and around Portland’s Forest Park, a real temperate rainforest that Ellis found daunting to illustrate. Its crowded trees and overwhelming natural abundance offered almost too much detail to capture. Meloy describes the park’s approximately 5,000 acres as a place that feels “bigger on the inside”.
Translating that environment into animation became a revelation for both creators. The finished world is dense, lush and painstakingly detailed—an ambition that helps explain why Knight spent nearly 16 years bringing Wildwood to the screen.
That balance between the familiar and the unknowable also runs through Meloy and Ellis’ wider work. Their inspirations include Japanese traditions, Slavic pagan stories and unusual corners of American history. For readers interested in turning imaginative worlds into a physical setup, RETROCADE’s arcade machine buying guide offers practical advice on choosing a cabinet.
What comes next for Wildwood?
The original Wildwood story grew into a trilogy during the 2010s, but Meloy is not committing to another book. He says a return would need to come from genuine enthusiasm rather than obligation. In the meantime, he has other book and film projects in progress.
A stage production of The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love also came close to happening, although Ellis says that production never reached the stage. Meloy continues to support high-school theatre groups willing to attempt it.
An open future suits Wildwood. Fairy tales endure because each generation reshapes them, and Meloy and Ellis remain ready to follow their next source of inspiration. The film is currently showing in cinemas.
For animation and stop-motion fans, the broader culture of handcrafted design can also be explored through RETROCADE’s arcade videos.
Related release: The Wolf Among Us Remastered is scheduled for release on October 29.
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