Sixteen years is a long stretch to sit with one story. Travis Knight has, and Wildwood is finally coming out the other side.

The American Film Institute announced Wednesday that Laika's latest stop-motion animated feature will open the 40th edition of AFI Fest on October 21, marking its US premiere. The film already has a world premiere lined up for October 11 at the London Film Festival, and it opens in American theatres just two days after the AFI screening, on October 23, distributed by Fathom Entertainment.

Wildwood is based on Colin Meloy's novel, adapted for the screen by Chris Butler and directed by Knight, who has run Laika's Oregon studio through five previous features, all of them Oscar nominees in the animated category: Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link. Wildwood is the sixth.

The story follows a teenager named Prue McKeel, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, whose baby brother gets snatched by a murder of crows. She and her classmate Curtis Mehlberg, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, head into what the film calls the Impassable Wilderness, an enchanted forest sitting just outside Portland, Oregon, thick with talking animals and bandits and other things a normal forest doesn't have.

The voice cast reads like a studio called in every favour it had going. Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant all feature.

"AFI is honored to celebrate Wildwood as the Opening Night Film of the 40th Annual AFI Fest," said AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale, calling the movie a handcrafted world that "dazzles and delights."

Knight, for his part, sounded like a man setting down something heavy. "Sixteen years is a long time to carry a story with you," he said. "'Wildwood' was built slowly, painstakingly, by hundreds of extraordinary artists and craftspeople who gave something of themselves to this movie." He called the AFI slot "a profound honor" after years of the project belonging only to the people making it.

Stop-motion is a brutal, patient craft, and Laika has never rushed one out. Kubo took years, Missing Link took years, and this one apparently took the longest of the lot. Whether that patience shows up on screen is what audiences at TCL Chinese Theatres and, later, everyone else will find out.

AFI Fest runs October 21-25 this year, its full lineup still under wraps. The festival is expected to reveal the rest of its slate on September 29, and last year's edition carried titles like Bugonia and Jay Kelly through its run. Whether Wildwood ends up in that kind of award-season conversation is the next thing to watch for, once critics actually see it in London and Los Angeles.