If you can draw a distinct line between fantasy lit and fairy tales — and why not try! — it might be in the world-building. Fantasy writers typically build universes from scratch. Fairy tales, on the other hand, have one foot plant in the familiar: the woods beyond the village, the strange creature at the edge of the road, the crow that steals a baby. At least that’s what The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and artist Carson Ellis tell me when I attempt to draw a distinction. Bless smart, creative people.
For the husband-and-wife creative team behind Wildwood, the distinction matters. Their story, adapted from Meloy’s novel and Ellis’ illustrations into a new animated film from stop-motion studio Laika, sets a fantastical adventure in the Pacific Northwest they call home. But on the other side of a nearby bridge, an otherworldly wilderness awaits those who possess the right spirit.
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“I feel like when we were first coming up with the story, we were trying to really go for the early stuff — pull from folktale and fair ytale tropes,” Meloy tells Polygon. “I think there’s so many things in the movie that, because that was really the intent from the outset, was to create a fairy tale. Inevitably, it ends up like fantasy in the context of 2026, but that’s what we were shooting for.”
For Meloy, fairy tales are the roots from which modern fantasy grew. Writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis built their invented worlds by cobbling together the language and imagery of older stories. But there’s a difference between creating an entirely new mythology and reaching back into the collective imagination for something that already feels ancient. Ellis, an illustrator whose richly detailed work helped define Wildwood on the page, points to the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as the fairy tales that have already been canonized. The trick is making those old stories feel alive again.
In Wildwood, that means beginning with a particularly grim piece of folklore: the kidnapping of a baby by crows, an image Meloy traces to Irish myth. If that sounds dark… it super is. Meloy says director Travis Knight wanted to embrace the stranger, scarier side of children’s entertainment, in the tradition of films like Watership Down, The Dark Crystal, and The Secret of NIMH (movies the musician loves). Those films trusted young audiences to grapple with danger and grief rather than sanding down every sharp edge. Wildwood does the same, which earns the animated film a rare PG-13 rating.
Wildwood takes place in and around Portland’s Forest Park, a real stretch of temperate rainforest that Ellis remembers struggling to illustrate. There was simply too much to capture: the density of the trees, the overwhelming abundance of the natural world. Meloy describes the park’s roughly 5,000 acres as a place that feels “bigger on the inside.” Seeing that environment translated to animation was a revelation for both Meloy and Ellis, meticulously detailed and lush — which may explain why it took Wildwood director Travis Knight nearly 16 years to bring it to screen.
That tension between the recognizable and the unknowable has long animated the pair’s work. Across their creative lives, Meloy and Ellis have drawn on an expansive palette of folklore, from Japanese traditions and Slavic pagan stories to the strange corners of American history. But will the pair ever return to Wildwood, which spanned an entire trilogy in the 2010s?
Meloy isn’t ruling out a return to Wildwood in book form, though he says any sequel would have to come from genuine enthusiasm rather than obligation. “I would have to make sure that it’s something that my heart was in,” he says. For now, he’s busy chasing whatever idea comes next. There are other book projects in the works, and other film work. (Although anyone like me who hopes to see a stage version of Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love should probably stop waiting; Ellis says one came close, but the production never materialized. Meloy continues to give his blessing to high school theater groups brave enough to try.)
It’s fitting that the future of Wildwood remains open-ended. Fairy tales have always survived by changing hands, and Meloy and Ellis wander with arms open, looking for the next great source of inspiration. Sometimes they discover it, and... sometimes they meet a guy wondering out loud about the difference between fairy tales and fantasy lit while promoting an animated movie.
Wildwood is currently out in theaters.
This story is part of Polygon's latest special issue, Happily Never After: A Week of Adult Fairy Tales, brought to you by The Wolf Among Us Remastered, out on Oct. 29.