Wildwood opened with $11M, and yet they spent $100M while shouting “F**k AI” from the rooftops. I appreciate the craft they put into this and I’m sure it will go down as an all-time stop motion classic, but there’s no need to hate on other art forms. They used a lot of technology for this film, including special camera rigs and 3d printers, Maya and AutoCAD. Why didn’t Laika hire hand-carvers for the 142,000 face plates instead of 3D printing them? Obviously because that would be infeasible and very expensive. All advancements in technology have broadened the frontier of the stories humans can tell. AI is just another tool in the toolkit of the artist.