Stop-motion remains one of cinema’s most demanding animation techniques. It creates the illusion of movement by photographing real objects and puppets, moving them slightly between each shot and projecting the images in sequence.
The technique dates back to The Humpty Dumpty Circus, released in 1898 and directed by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. Decades later, films such as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride showed that stop-motion could support sophisticated feature-length stories, despite the considerable amount of manual work involved.
Wildwood, directed by Travis Knight, has now taken the record for the longest stop-motion animated feature. The 2026 film runs for 132 minutes, exceeding the 117-minute length of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which previously held the Guinness World Records-listed record. Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs had reached 101 minutes in 2018.
The film was released in Spain on October 23 and was produced by Laika, the US studio behind films including Coraline. It is based on Colin Meloy’s novel of the same name.
The project took 16 years to develop after Laika acquired the rights to the book in 2011, although production itself began in 2020. Animation work lasted 231 weeks and involved more than 1,000 artists and other professionals.
The team built 132 sets and approximately 230 handcrafted puppets. One of the most demanding creations was an eagle called The General, which required around 3,000 hours of work and nearly 4,000 feathers.
To reproduce the characters’ expressions, the production also created more than 140,000 interchangeable faces. Wildwood contains approximately 2,700 shots and over 165,000 individual frames, underscoring the scale of the craftsmanship behind its record-breaking runtime.
Sources: elDiario.es.