Laika’s Wildwood is headed for a major festival launch: the animated feature is scheduled to open the 40th edition of AFI Fest on October 21, 2026. The screening will also serve as the film’s U.S. premiere, placing the Portland-based studio’s newest feature at the front of a five-day program of premieres, international cinema, documentaries, short films and special screenings.
Directed and produced by Travis Knight, Wildwood takes audiences into a strange forest beyond Portland, Oregon, where the ordinary rules of a rescue mission apparently do not apply. Its central character, Prue, is voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee. When her baby brother is taken by a murder of crows, she ventures into the forbidden Wildwood in an effort to bring him home. Her classmate Curtis, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, joins the journey.
That premise gives the film a deceptively clear quest structure: a child must enter an unknown land, locate a missing sibling and find a way back. But the path is populated by talking animals, bandits, enchanted beings and powerful figures, suggesting a fantasy world with many more hazards than a simple bird-related kidnapping incident. The crows, it must be said, are making an extremely persuasive argument for keeping all family members indoors during peak ominous-forest season.
A Laika fantasy built for a festival opening night
Laika has become closely associated with handcrafted animated storytelling, and AFI Fest’s opening-night selection places Wildwood in a setting designed to spotlight ambitious filmmaking. The festival described the film as an imaginative, handmade world intended to inspire and entertain, a framing that fits the studio’s identity while avoiding the assumption that “handcrafted” means “small in scope.” A story can be made with painstaking physical artistry and still include a forest full of magical chaos.
Knight’s connection to the project has been especially long-running. He said he carried the story for 16 years before its emergence at the festival, and credited the hundreds of artists and craftspeople involved in bringing it to the screen. That timeframe gives the opening-night slot an added sense of arrival: the U.S. premiere is not merely the first local public stop for a new release, but the public unveiling of a world that its makers have spent years constructing.
“Sixteen years is a long time to carry a story with you,” Knight said, describing a production built gradually by a large group of artists and craftspeople.
His remarks also underline the collective nature of animated filmmaking. While a director’s name naturally leads a headline, the finished feature reflects the work of many departments and individual makers. In the case of a fantasy populated by multiple kinds of creatures, characters and locations, that collaborative scale is part of the appeal. Audiences may meet Prue and Curtis first, but a setting such as Wildwood needs its own visual logic, its own inhabitants and enough strange corners to make the journey feel larger than a straight line from problem to solution.
Prue and Curtis enter the forbidden forest
Prue’s objective is urgent and personal: saving her baby brother from the crows. Curtis’s decision to accompany her supplies the story with a second young perspective as the pair heads beyond the familiar edges of Portland. The setting is notable because it connects an enchanted realm to a real-world city rather than placing the entire adventure in a detached fairy-tale kingdom. The forest is outside Portland, but its inhabitants and rules are far beyond everyday Oregon geography.
The supplied details establish several types of encounters awaiting the duo:
- A murder of crows responsible for taking Prue’s brother.
- Talking animals within the forest.
- Bandits whose role in the larger conflict has not been detailed.
- Other powerful figures encountered as the rescue mission develops.
Those elements point to a fantasy adventure driven by discovery as much as pursuit. Prue is not entering a wilderness that is simply empty or hostile; she is entering a place with communities, personalities and dangers. The distinction matters. A forest filled with speaking animals and bandits is a place where every route can become a negotiation, a detour or an ill-advised conversation with someone who has considerably more local knowledge than the visitors.
Lee and Tremblay lead the voice cast, while the wider ensemble includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant. No character assignments for those performers were included with the festival news, so it remains best to let the film reveal who is allied with Prue, who is standing in her way and who may be a crow with a surprisingly complicated explanation.
An unusually deep voice ensemble
The supporting lineup brings together performers whose work spans film, television, comedy, drama and animation. That does not reveal the precise tone of Wildwood, but it does make the size of the vocal ensemble clear. A story packed with creatures, bandits and mysterious authority figures has room for a broad collection of voices, and the announced cast gives the project a notably extensive group of recognizable talent around its two young leads.
It is also worth keeping expectations focused on what has actually been confirmed. The October 21 screening is the U.S. premiere and the AFI Fest opening-night presentation. The provided information does not specify a wider release date, theatrical plan, streaming destination, runtime or rating. Festival placement can create plenty of momentum, but it should not be treated as a substitute for distribution details that have not been announced here.
What AFI Fest’s 40th edition has planned
AFI Fest runs from October 21 through October 25, 2026, with Canva presenting the event. As its opening-night title, Wildwood will set the tone for a milestone edition that includes red-carpet premieres alongside special presentations, world cinema, documentary programming and short films. The festival’s format makes an animated feature a fitting opener: it offers an immediate showcase for a distinctive filmmaking method while still landing within a program built around multiple forms and perspectives.
Last year’s program included Bugonia, Christy, Jay Kelly and The Testament of Ann Lee, among other selections. That recent slate illustrates the event’s interest in high-profile premieres and varied storytelling rather than a single genre lane. For 2026, Wildwood arrives as a family-centered fantasy with a darker fairytale hook, and an opening-night berth means it will be one of the festival’s most visible titles from the outset.
The broader entertainment calendar is already taking shape across different stages and formats. For another example of an upcoming arts schedule built around prominent performers and premieres, see the National Theatre’s announced 2027 program. AFI Fest’s plan is its own kind of showcase, however: a compact run of screen work in which opening night carries the special pressure of being both the first event and the first invitation for audiences to step inside the week’s program.
Why the U.S. premiere matters for ‘Wildwood’
A U.S. premiere at a festival creates a defined first meeting between a film and its domestic audience. For Wildwood, that meeting is particularly apt because the production comes from a Portland studio and its fantasy landscape sits beyond Portland itself. The film’s fictional forest is not a documentary version of the city’s surroundings, of course, but the geographic connection adds a pleasing local echo to a U.S. debut in Los Angeles.
Knight characterized AFI Fest as a place with a history of supporting bold and distinctive filmmaking, and described the chance to finally invite people into the world of Wildwood as a privilege. After 16 years of development and production work, the first U.S. festival audience will get to see what that long journey has produced: Prue and Curtis, a stolen baby brother, a murder of crows and a forbidden forest that seems determined to make a rescue mission as magical, dangerous and gloriously inconvenient as possible.
