Wildwood is the absolute peak of its handmade craft. But before thousands of artists spent 16 years building Wildwood the movie, Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis breathed the story to life as a book. The husband and wife author-illustrator pair are prolific storytellers. Meloy has been writing narrative music as the lead singer of The Decemberists for nearly 25 years, and Ellis has been illustrating and creating imaginative children’s books for nearly as long.
“Once I discovered music, I had to find a way of making it kind of narrative, you know,” Meloy told But Why Tho. “Narrative storytelling, I think, has wormed its way into everything I do.” Their whimsy and creativity shine brightly through Wildwood. The story of a young girl who enters a magical world of talking animals and warring factions comes from two lifetimes of weaving imaginative narratives. “Wildwood was an opportunity to really explore that fully and create this world inside the book.”
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Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis are the original author and illustrator behind Wildwood.
Meloy is famous for his unique turns of phrase, often employing big and obscure words to evoke very particular feelings. Even in Wildwood, which was written and filmed with young audiences in mind, he never shies away from language that the average person might not know how to define. “A lot of those words, I feel like it actually doesn’t occur to me that I’m doing it or that it will be challenging. I just like the lyricism of it,” Meloy mused.
“Coming from my own childhood, I loved reading books that felt like they treated me with intelligence and understood that [they weren’t] talking down to me,” continued Meloy, reflecting on how important it is to talk to kids no differently than you would talk to an adult. “Then, I might even be challenged by those [books]. Those were the sorts of books I loved as a kid, and I wanted to write something in that mode.”
For Ellis, “The books I loved when I was a kid, like the Narnia Chronicles, illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the illustrations served this great purpose. They brought me through the book. They made me keep reading, and they kept me interested,” she recalled.
Ellis and Meloy’s storytelling mastery made Wildwood so easy to adapt.
The world of Wildwood was so deep and lived-in even before Ellis’s illustrations painted a fuller picture of just how the creators imagined their story. But even with all of her partner’s word painting and illustration, Ellis felt “I still was able to really picture that world on my own too.”
Allowing readers to imagine Wildwood for themselves is what made it possible for LAIKA Studios to craft Wildwood into a stop-motion animated film. “I want to create an immersive world that people can get really lost in. That’s always the first thing in my mind,” Meloy explained. “[LAIKA] invited us to be involved a lot, initially. But I was never going to be the sort of writer of an adapted book that just wants to be on set all the time, looking over people’s shoulders. I don’t think good art is made that way.”
Rather, Meloy believes, “I think you have to hand it off to somebody and let them cook. And there might be moments where you’re like, ‘Well, I would have done that differently.’ But that’s part of [it]. Everybody’s [got a] different perspective on making art.”
Ellis agreed, sharing how “I feel like once we handed [Wildwood] over to LAIKA, we were happy to sit back and see what they would do with it. In fact, it was so exciting to watch them do that, and of course to watch them build that whole world and all those people in miniature ,and then animate them. That was such a joy to witness.”
Wildwood is an absolute triumph of human creativity.
Still, the pair has their darlings. For Ellis, it’s Curtis. “I loved the way that they wrote and animated Curtis. Everything about that character feels like the heart of the movie to me.” For Meloy, it’s the coyotes. “The coyotes in their 19th-century military garb are spot on. It must have been a lot of fun to costume. It certainly was a lot of fun to write that into it, and I think that they did a bang-up job with that.”
One change they were curious about was a small one. “I have a favorite illustration in the book, and it’s this badger pulling a rickshaw,” Ellis described. “That made its way into the movie, though. [in the movie, it’s] a warthog. Not sure why—but it’s still pulling a rickshaw. There’s this incredible chase scene that leads up to it, and then it has this great comic ending. I love to.”
“We still haven’t found out why that’s a warthog and not a badger, [though].” Meloy joked. “Like, is it [because] badgers [aren’t] native or something?”
Regardless of which animal pulled the ruckshaw in the end, Wildwood is an absolute triumph of human creativity, thanks to the creative, deeply lived-in storytelling of its original author and illustrator, Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis.
Wildwood is playing now in theaters everywhere.
