Making AI Headlines · Page 7
Laika Declines to Optimize Away the Puppets
· New York time
Wildwood director Travis Knight says AI is 'antithetical to everything that we are at this studio,' in a Verge interview about Laika's stop-motion work. The studio's latest fantasy adventure took five years to complete and used more than 230 puppets, including 36 versions of its main character, Prue. Those details make the creative position unusually tangible. Laika's process depends on physically constructed characters and painstaking animation, not merely an aesthetic that could be described in a prompt. Thirty-six versions of one protagonist also suggest that being the main character comes with a substantial storage requirement. Knight's stance is a statement about the studio's artistic identity, not proof that every creative business will make the same choice. It does, however, illustrate how some filmmakers distinguish their work through process as well as the finished image. The labor is part of what the studio says it is making. For audiences and creative workers, that provides a concrete alternative to treating faster output as the only measure of progress. Five years is not an efficiency slogan. It is a production commitment. In an industry increasingly offered instant generation, Laika is still willing to build another puppet and move it a very small distance on purpose.
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