By Amy Wang for The Oregonian/ Oregonlive.com September 18, 2021:
“It’s happening! It’s really happening!” That was Portland author and musician Colin Meloy‘s delighted tweet on Wednesday. “I’m super excited to see what these guys do with Wildwood,” Meloy added.
That would be “Wildwood” as in the 2011 children’s fantasy novel set in Portland’s Forest Park that put Meloy, frontman of the Portland band The Decemberists, on the map as an author. After a decade of holding the movie rights to the book, the Hillsboro-based animation studio Laika announced that “Wildwood” will be its next film.
Laika head Travis Knight called the book “a madly ambitious story of magic, wonder and danger.” It’s illustrated by Carson Ellis, a Caldecott Honor illustrator who is Meloy’s wife. (“Very exciting news!” Ellis wrote Wednesday on her Instagram account.)
Here’s the full story from my colleague Mike Rogoway.
Meloy wrote two sequels, “Under Wildwood” and “Wildwood Imperium” — no word on whether Laika plans a screen trilogy, or whether Meloy will get to contribute to the soundtrack or Ellis to the visuals. Regardless, it’s a great match: a Portland-set story by an Oregon author and illustrator, and an Oregon studio whose previous films have told, well, ambitious stories of magic, wonder and danger. (Two other Laika films are also adaptations of fantasy novels: Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” and Alan Snow’s “Here Be Monsters!,” which was renamed “The Boxtrolls” at the box office.)
