Book Review - The Art of Wildwood
October 5th 2026
Laika returns this year with their most ambitious stop motion movie yet, Wildwood. The hand-crafted magic is spectacular to look at, but you can’t start building models of the world and its characters without a talented group of people to design them first. Enter The Art of Wildwood, a new book to give these artists a showcase of their own, and a well-deserved one at that.
With a release date of October 6th, 2026, Laika has partnered with publisher Rizzoli Universe to present this collection of artwork and insights to those wanting more from Wildwood after seeing the movie. The book has joined the collection here, so I can now give my thoughts on this new release and what you can expect to find inside.
Production Quality
The Art of Wildwood comes as a 28.5cm x 24.5cm hardcover with 176 pages, not as large a lot of releases, but it’s hardly small either. There are a couple of downsides though, the first being that some of the print finishes are dark, and while sitting directly under a light helped, it’s not ideal. The binding on my copy is already not the greatest either, as the backing and ribbon has separated from the pages at either end. It hasn’t completely come apart for the entire length, but it’s a problem that progresses and isn’t good for the long-term preservation of the book. Already the book will have to be handled with extra care, and that’s a shame. I do think the cover artwork was a excellent choice that sets high expectations as to quality of the art inside.
Content
Inside is a wonderful collection of early artwork for Wildwood, featuring a lot of what I expected and hoped to see from the book. Before that though, you get a nice foreword from writer Colin Meloy and an introduction from director Travis Knight, each speaking to the long journey the movie took to come to fruition, acting as a brilliant set up for the huge amount of artwork that immediately follows.
There is a mix of early sketches, colour concepts, keyframes, storyboards, and set photos, which is the norm for artbooks, but it is really well balanced in The Art of Wildwood. A lot of the sketches are for the characters, with some nice stuff for Prue’s parents, Maksim, and more that show early and unused designs. There is a lot of full colour concepts for the characters, locations, and set dressing as well, all of which look superb in many styles and show how much the team thought about the small details.
The biggest highlight for me are keyframes and environments, each of which look stunning and worthy of being on a poster or in a frame. The colours, angles, scale, and details all shine and leave you lost in them, such as Prue riding the eagle known as the General. As I was looking at many of these pieces, I could imagine the characters moving through the scene and immediately hear in my mind what they would sound like. The stop motion is incredible, but in any of the different art styles shared here, I would just as happily watch an entire movie delivered with artistry like this.
The photos of the sets and people working on them are peppered throughout and feel well thought out. Some movie artbooks over use photos for me, but the implementation here works incredibly well to show how the concepts were translated to the models. I also like that photos are not movie stills, but often show the studio background, the hands of the model maker, or even people sat inside of a huge set. It was also fun to see how small some elements are, such as the rat character Septima, who is smaller than a little finger.
One of my favourite spreads seen below of Prue’s home is what I hope to see in more books, the development from early sketch to final design, or in this case, the final model, all organised together.
As mentioned earlier, some of the images are dark because of the print finish, and it does negatively affect some of them. What makes it worse, and it’s a thing that has been increasingly frustrating me, is that some artbooks decide to use dark themed concepts with a sudden change to black page backgrounds. While I understand it suits them thematically and exaggerates dark environments or the night time, if they are too dark and unclear, it exaggerates that problem too. It’s not the worst I’ve seen and impacts only a small number of images, but it is worth highlighting.
The writing speaks to the characters, the locations and their heavy Portland influence, the approach to designs, and more. The vast majority of this is done through interviews with the writer, director, producers, and other members of the team. Character designer Thibault Leclercq for example is quoted a lot, giving insights into the thoughts that go into the characters based on their personalities. It’s a good read that you don’t want to skip, adding more value to the book.
Artist Credits
This is a confusing one for me, because artist credits are included, which is better than some books, but their implementation hasn’t been done well. Rather than feature them on each page, in which there is more than enough room for, they instead placed them on a page in the back. Sadly, they are shared as a block paragraph across three columns that includes the page and positions of their art, but it’s not very readable.
When placed on the page, people are much more likely to take notice, but just reading it in this format takes much more effort than it should, let alone actually using it to find out who did what. At the very least the individual artists and their pages should have been separated from each other. This was a very odd approach that there are much better solutions for, also making crediting the pages here very tedious, which should never be the case.
Use of Space
Outside of the use of credits, the page design is strong throughout. Each spread is filled nicely and it is all very readable with no overlap. Text placement is tackled in the same way, and when used on top of double page spreads, as seen for each new chapter title, it does not impact the main focus of artwork too much. It’s a simple approach we have seen before, but that’s because it works and puts the art front and centre.
Value
This volume of art comes with an RRP of $45 in the US and £32.50 in the UK, which places it in the expected price range of an artbook in 2026. This seems more than fair for its size and sheer amount of artwork. The production quality isn’t as high as found in other publisher’s releases, but this is at the lower end of the normal price range, so I don’t think fans will feel let down for what they pay.
As I write this just before the book’s release, there are already discounts online to take advantage of too. Using Amazon as always for consistency, in the US it has a small price drop to $42, saving a little extra and that can never hurt. In the UK though, it is already down to £24.50, which is a big saving and an enticing price for what you get. If the US price got to around $35 or below to match this, it would be more than worth it to overlook the small issues I've encountered if you like the movie and previews.
Verdict
The Art of Wildwood comes with some truly beautiful concepts and artwork, transporting readers into the fantasy world of the movie. It’s no surprise that the 2D artists are just as talented as the people making the models and creating the film, with this being a presentation of their work that shows that off superbly, with pieces I know I will revisit many times in the future.
There are some setbacks that stop it from being one of 2026’s great artbooks though, particularly the production quality, but I feel that I could still recommend it to someone that wants more from Wildwood after the credits roll, because what works does make up for it.
If you enjoyed the review and previews and would like to add the book to your own collection, you can order The Art of Wildwood here;
Tags; #RizzoliUniverse #Laika #Wildwood
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