"Explain to me how they did the mist and smoke effects"- They did them with CGI. Lol. I've seen several people sharing this picture as an example of the amazing "stop motion" in the movie, but all the smoke, clouds, cinders in the air, etc. are obviously CGI. I would guess some of the characters are too. This does nothing to take away from the animation work on this movie- which is, as I said before, very impressive- but it's really starting to irritate me how they're playing up this "it's all handmade" angle, which is a huge part of why people are so amazed by it, they think it was all done for real somehow. Again, what they did is amazing, but I'd be surprised if there's a single shot in this movie that doesn't have some CGI. This shot in particular is over half CGI. Watch the video I'm attaching and you can see how much CGI there is even in just a simple shot of the characters walking a few feet. They didn't build any of the background and they only built the first story of the building. They built around 230 puppets for the movie- which is a lot of puppets!- but you understand that means that in the big shots with much more than 230 characters, you're not looking at only physical puppets, right? At best you're looking at a few physical puppets digitally replicated, but in several places you're looking at a whole lot of CGI characters. In a shot like the one in the video I attached, to do the background practically wouldn't mean they had to build everything full scale- they could have painted a 2D backdrop or used forced perspective or a smaller scale in the distance, but they wanted everything to look vast and 3D, which is fine, but I think a more old school approach would have looked better. In the shots where the eagle is flying through clouds and stuff, you know that all the clouds are CGI, right? All the shots with smoke and that kind of thing use CGI. Old school stop motion would have used cotton or similar, or maybe just stylized, painted clouds. It's a choice, you can do either now, but I would preferred the older, handmade version, and if they're going to brag so much about this movie being handmade, then they should have actually done that. Even things like the characters' faces, on most of the puppets the way this is done is to have a mask that's replaced every frame, and the way they made those faces on this movie is to sculpt the expressions in the computer and 3D print them. That's why their facial movements seem so fluid- it's a performance created in a computer, and then a copy of it is 3D printed. Depending on the design of the character, the masks don't always fit the puppets seamlessly though- see also the other picture I'm attaching and look at Curtis' face- and so they also then digitally erase the seams and touch up the puppets. So you're seeing a performance that was done in a computer, then a copy of it was 3D printed by a computer, they put it onto a physical puppet, and then they finished it off by touching it up in a computer. Still some amazing artistry! But "all handmade"? Well, their hands operated the computers. I'm also seeing a lot of "It took 16 years to make!" Well, Travis Knight became interested in the book around 16 years ago and after that they developed the script and things for a while as they worked on other projects. Actual production of Wildwood began in 2021, so they were shooting the movie for about five years. Five years is still a long time to make a movie and, again, a crazy amount of work went into this movie! But it was more like five years, not 16. I'm not trying to piss all over what they made, I'm just pointing out the reality because a lot of people seem to be buying into these myths that it took 16 years to make and everything that they saw on the screen was real. Those two misconceptions I think are a lot of why people are so blown away by what I think is ultimately a fairly mediocre story. But still some very impressive animation! It's just very impressive animation that's half CGI. And made in five years