The Night Gardener

The Night Gardener is an upcoming stop-motion animated feature from LAIKA, the Portland-based studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Announced in April 2022, the film is based on an original idea by Bill Dubuque, the creator and showrunner of Netflix's Ozark, and represents a departure from LAIKA's typical fantasy fare into grittier territory. The story is described as a neo-noir folktale centered on a young man in rural Missouri fighting to keep his family together in the wake of a tragedy. Travis Knight, LAIKA's CEO and the director of Kubo and the Two Strings and Bumblebee, is set to direct. The collaboration between Knight and Dubuque brings together LAIKA's painstaking stop-motion craft with the dark, character-driven storytelling that defined Ozark's five-season run on Netflix. The film remains in active development at LAIKA's Hillsboro, Oregon campus, though no release date has been announced. LAIKA currently has multiple projects in various stages of production at their facility, including the animated feature Wildwood (scheduled for October 23, 2026), the live-action Seventeen, and an adaptation of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi, all under Travis Knight's direction. The Night Gardener's neo-noir tone would make it the studio's most mature work to date.