LAIKA has a puppet hospital. Once you start looking at the machinery inside its Wildwood characters, that sounds less like a cute nickname and more like essential infrastructure.
Adam Savage’s new Tested visit takes the film’s miniature cast seriously as engineering. His guide is Oliver Jones, LAIKA’s head of character and practical effects, and the published chapter list runs from costume micro-engineering to spring-steel hands, mechanical chests and animatable muscles. The fantasy creatures have a lot going on beneath the surface.
A tiny body has to survive a big performance
The Tested studio tour places traditional wire hands and puppet wear at 6:41, Prue’s digital and physical armature at 8:09, and the puppet hospital at 9:49. Spring-steel armature hands follow at 11:13. Even that sequence of subjects tells you something useful: making a character move and keeping it usable are connected problems.
For anyone who has struggled to keep a miniature standing, the appeal is immediate. A stop-motion character needs to hold a pose while still allowing its animator to change it. Repeat that demand across a performance, and the hidden construction starts to matter as much as the finished face or costume.
At 15:00, the tour turns to Septima, identified in Tested’s chapter description as LAIKA’s smallest animatable armature. Later chapters cover external rigging, mechanical chest rigs and muscle engineering. These are useful jumping-off points for viewers who want the workshop details rather than another trailer.
Yes, one of the puppets can flex
In Cartoon Brew’s firsthand studio report, Jones explains that Wildwood’s Alexandra puppet has an animatable bicep, as do the bandits Niamh and Seamus. The mechanism uses a mesh material associated with hat making: compressing it in one direction makes it expand in the other.
The same report describes CNC-steel armatures and a silicone sponge developed for the puppets. Costume designer Deborah Cook also explains why shrinking clothes is a physics problem. The team can make fabrics with animation in mind, including materials with wiring or a weave that helps them behave at puppet scale.
Those choices give the craft story its bite. A muscle bulge or a convincing fold might register for a moment on screen. Behind it sits a very specific problem someone had to solve.
Handmade does not mean technology-free
Cartoon Brew also reports that LAIKA scans physical assets for digital extensions and doubles. The practical work and visual effects belong to the same production, so this is no reason to call Wildwood “CGI-free.”
Wildwood opened in U.S. theaters on October 23, 2026, according to distributor Fathom Entertainment. Its story follows Prue into a forbidden forest to rescue her baby brother. Before or after that adventure, Savage’s visit offers another reason to appreciate the cast: the small mechanical bodies doing the work underneath it.
