Wildwood

Let’s talk about Wildwood.

Its official trailer came out August 19th, and in under a week it has amassed over 85 million YouTube views. To put those numbers in context, the trailer for this summer’s box office champion, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, currently sits at 42 million YouTube views.

While we’re on the topic of YouTube views, let’s pause and analyze the track record of the song that is propelling this Wildwood official trailer: a sadcore cover version of “Wake Me Up” by Nashville-based producer Tommee Profitt and vocalist Fleurie. This song was originally recorded as an uptempo country-meets-EDM song by Avicii and Aloe Blacc, and their music video for “Wake Me Up” (released in 2013) has over 2.5 billion YouTube views.

Wildwood is a stop-motion animation film created by Laika, the studio that brought us Coraline in 2009. Set in Oregon, it’s an adaptation of children’s fantasy novels by Colin Meloy (lead singer of indie rock band The Decemberists).

But enough backstory. The Wildwood official trailer opens with a 30-second backstory of the film’s antagonist, Alexandra, and the tragic death of her son Alexei. A series of three sombre piano chords set up the opening line of the first verse at 0:15, “Feeling my way through the darkness, guided by a beating heart.” The words reflect the grief Alexandra’s character feels, and we see the source of her pain at 0:25: Alexei’s fatal horse-riding accident.

Now when a trailer features a remix of an existing song, sometimes some liberties are taken with the song structure. This happens tastefully at 0:30 in the Wildwood trailer, where we meet our protagonist, Prue, and her baby brother, Mac. As Fleurie sings “ I wish that I could stay forever this young,” we’ve now jumped from verse 1 of “Wake Me Up” to halfway through verse 2.

Spoiler alert: sweet baby Mac gets abducted by a murder of crows and taken to a magical forest. But since that moment sets the story’s plot in motion, it features prominently in the trailer. From 0:42 to 1:02, we see Prue and her brother in the park surrounded by crows. Here it feels like a music video. We see a park with hundreds of crows, sitting then taking flight en masse, and rather than hearing these infamously noisy birds, we pretty much only hear the pristine studio recording of “Wake Me Up”.

Next, instead of transitioning right into the song’s chorus after the end of the second verse, an extra 5 measures of instrumental (from 0:58-1:17) are added, featuring piano and strings, and this leaves space for voiceover providing key plot details. Fleurie’s vocals are back at 1:15, “So wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser and I’m older,” accompanied by sustained block chords from the string and brass sections. On screen we see Prue and her classmate Curtis set off on their adventure (biking down the side of a cliff and into the forest).

Near the end of the trailer, at 1:55 we see the beginning of an epic battle. and here the music makes for a beautiful juxtaposition. We’re at the climax of the action in this story, visually, and instead of becoming larger, louder and more epic, the orchestra drops out entirely, leaving only Fleurie’s vocals and upper register piano, making this feel gentler and even more subdued than at the start. But don’t worry, the orchestra comes back full force, complete with big drums and trailer triplets for the big finish as we see fireballs on catapults, a bear stampeding into the coyote army, and Prue’s desperate efforts to save her brother.

Sonically, “Wake Me Up” does some heavy lifting in this trailer–much of the time this song is the only sound we hear. For a massively ambitious stop-motion undertaking, we can guess that the sound design and post-production sound mixing for this film is taking up a great deal of the 2026 workload for the Laika team, so perhaps it makes sense to let the music carry the trailer. While lyrically we only get snippets of the first two verses and most of one chorus, the lyrics fit the story on screen quite effectively and lend a dreamlike quality to the storytelling that fits well in the fantasy genre.

Wildwood is in theatres October 23.

— Jack Hui Litster