Annecy 2026: With Prue and the Prophecy of the Forest, Travis Knight ignites the festival

Travis Knight was in Annecy to unveil three new sequences from his anticipated major stop-motion project. Adapted from the cult novel by Colin Meloy, carried by a crazy cast (Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Tom Waits) and made frame by frame, Pru is perhaps the great animated film of the year. Report.

Just before the presentation of the exciting seven minutes of Ray Gunn by Brad Bird, another American came to unveil the first images of his next feature. Travis Knight, the boss of the Laika studio, set down his suitcases at the lake for the first time and we rolled out the red carpet for him for the occasion. Inauguration of the brand new International City of Animated Cinema, sublime exhibition in the Gallery (“Wildwood: A First Glimpse into a Handmade World”, on view until September 27, a real marvel) and above all an hour of conversation during which he revealed three unpublished extracts from this Wildwood (Prue and the Forest Prophecy in VF) which will arrive in theaters on December 9.

As he told the full hall of the City, he has been working on this project for more than 15 years. In 2011, Colin Meloy (lead singer of the folk group Decemberists) was still finishing his first novel when he had Knight read the proofs. The latter immediately falls in love with the story. The book is more than 500 pages (“we had to cut it down a lot,” laughed Knight yesterday) and quickly established itself as a little young adult classic of the 2010s. Imagine a Narnia revisited in an indie Portland style, dark and wonderful, where kids with glasses and bikes fall into a forest populated by talking animals and bandits at war. But what immediately appealed to the boss of Laika was not just the universe or this mixture of folk melancholy and epic fantasy. It’s mainly Prue McKeel, the heroine. When she sees her little brother Mac being kidnapped by a flock of crows, she chases them to the edge of a magnificent and terrifying forest. Against everything the adults tell her, Prue decides to venture there accompanied by her class friend Curtis Mehlberg. There, she will discover a world apart, an animal people organized into a society, with its bandits, its ruling caste (birds) and its clan war. Everything is animated frame by frame….

Because this is where Laika’s specificity lies. In a world dominated by cartoons or computer-generated images (Disney-Pixar, DreamWorks, Illumination, don’t forget!), the studio’s creators have from the outset chosen frame-by-frame animation, with puppets. This unique style has given rise to some masterpieces (Coraline, Kubo, The Boxtrolls) and above all allowed them to touch on more adult, more singular themes. Precisely what Knight said on stage when looking back on the making of this crazy film. There are the dizzying numbers (136 sets built in the studio, 231 puppets, 9,000 feathers placed by hand on the single giant eagle which serves as the heroine’s mount), but above all there is a tone, a universe and an astounding aesthetic. On the strength of its director and the images, Prue… promises to be a dark and majestic work with a stunning fantasy universe. Portland, the forest, the animal kingdom: everything has a density and a carnal dimension that we haven’t seen in the studio since… Coraline.

The ambition, basically, was to do justice to this fable crossing of black shards, which speaks head-on about loss. That of a brother, kidnapped by birds. But behind it, that of innocence. Prue’s journey is the end of childhood, the collapse of the certainties that we carry around like a ball and chain when we are twelve years old. The entire initial kidnapping sequence is filmed like a waking nightmare, and the sequel confirms this. What we were able to glimpse – a heroine who copes with reality and will be forced to grow up at full speed – reminds us that Laika has never done reassuring or roudoudou animation. The studio has been looking for Coraline to find the territory where the children’s story transforms into a story for adults in the making.

Knight therefore came with three extracts.

First a chase through the streets of Portland. It all starts with Prue walking her little brother through town. The film plays with all the clichés of the indie city, populated by creatives alterand kindly bobos. The post-hippie spirit floats through the sequence: a coffee shop, bicycles everywhere, and a man in Darth Vader who passes by on a unicycle (“he really exists, he’s a local celebrity,” swears Knight). And then comes park time. Crows mysteriously gather at children’s games (impossible not to think of Birds by Hitchcock), rush towards little Mac and carry him into the air. Prue then jumps on her bike and starts zigzagging between cars and buses until she reaches the edge of the forest. Cut. Crazy fluidity (we always forget that these are puppets animated frame by frame), impressive light effects, amazing sense of editing and space… It’s truly cinema.

The second sequence is more classic. Curtis, separated from Prue, is taken in by Alexandra in a large room with a heroic fantasy atmosphere. The antagonist speaks to the kid at length, and during the discussion we understand that she has lost her son. The scene is of a troubled, almost maternal sweetness, and that is the whole trap it sets for Curtis. This is where Septimus, the wood rat, appears, both companion and accomplice of the young hero in Meloy’s novel. A puppet so tiny that it fits on the tip of a finger, that Laika artisans compare to a human hair when it escapes from their hands. The rat and the boy sniff each other, size each other up. That sums up the whole project: precision, humor, love of detail, and crazy belief that an artisanal gesture can still turn a room upside down.

Latest video. Prue is on the back of a giant eagle. The General, dubbed in original version by Angela Bassett, is 86 cm long, 106 cm wingspan, 9,000 feathers placed one by one. The camera takes off, crosses the forest, and switches to a breathtaking action scene. Crows swoop down on the bird of prey, wolves appear on the ground to pounce on its legs, the sky tears apart. Ample staging, steady pace, staggering effects of scale. At this precise moment, we understand what Knight means when he repeats that Prue is “as epic as Lord of the Rings “. No one has ever filmed a dogfight like this in stop-motion.

All this beauty (Knight keeps hammering home) is manufactured frame by frame, and produces a material that no AI will ever be able to imitate. Caleb Deschanel, one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, takes a photo that gives the sets the depth of a living cinema. This is the real mantra of this presentation: “artistry over algorithms”. At a time when AI is scratching at the doors of creative departments, the boss of Laika claims sixteen years spent on this project, and it shows in every shot. The teaser released in May has accumulated nearly 100 million views on YouTube, a historic score for an animated film trailer. Seeing Travis Knight in Annecy, seeing the reactions of the audience, we have the very clear feeling that we will have to reckon with Prue at the end of the year.