Wildwood channels The Decemberists’ folk fairytale legacy
Wildwood is a new stop-motion animated film from Laika, adapted from a novel by Colin Meloy of folk-rock band The Decemberists, featuring illustrations by Carson Ellis. The article explores the creative team’s approach to fairy tale storytelling, examining how fairy tales differ fundamentally from fantasy literature.
While fantasy writers typically construct entirely new universes from scratch, fairy tales operate differently—they ground the fantastical in the familiar. They feature recognizable elements like woods beyond a village, strange creatures appearing at civilization’s edge, and magical events within ordinary settings. For Meloy and Ellis, this distinction proved crucial to their artistic vision for Wildwood. Rather than building a wholly invented world, they’ve crafted their story using fairy tale conventions, anchoring the fantastical adventure in the Pacific Northwest—the region the creators call home.
This approach of rooting fantasy in recognizable geography and archetypal fairy tale elements, rather than entirely invented fantasy world-building, shapes the film’s narrative and aesthetic. The project represents a multi-layered creative translation, moving from Meloy’s novel through Ellis’s visual illustrations to Laika’s stop-motion animation format, bringing together literary and visual storytelling traditions into contemporary animated cinema.