The stop-motion animation studio Laika is back this year with Wildwood, and some of the faces behind the studio sat down at the Telluride Film Festival to discuss the making of the film. The conversation included Laika President and CEO Travis Knight, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, and film expert Dave Karger.

The group was asked about the difficult process that is stop-motion animation, and Deschanel responded with, “In this movie, you do one little piece at a time. It’s like this giant mosaic that you have to piece together one piece at a time.” Travis Knight added that the only way to make a proper stop-motion animated film is to “repeat the process over and over and over again until the film is either done, or until society collapses.” He continued to say, “animators are hunched over these puppets all day long. They’re like these benevolent gods with lower back pain.”

Adding on to that, Knight brought up how stop-motion animation manages to stand out with A.I.-generated content being so common now. “We live in an era that’s largely frictionless, where entire worlds can be just generated with a click of a mouse, and things can spring to life with nothing but a prompt.”

Wildwood is directed by Travis Knight, who also helmed Masters of the Universe earlier this year. While his is the president of Laika, this is only his second film directed at the studio, the first being Kubo and the Two Strings. The voice cast features Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Mahershala Ali, Carey Mulligan, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Jermaine Clement and Richard E. Grant.

Wildwood hits theaters on October 23.