Directed by: Travis Knight
Written by: Chris Butler
Starring: Peyton Elizabeth, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, and Mahershala Ali
Runtime: 132 minutes
Stop-motion ‘Wildwood’ a triumph of craftsmanship
Go see “Wildwood” on the biggest screen you can find. I beg you, Take a child. Heck, take ten children. Then go see it again. Throw your money at Laika Studios, please, so we can get more handcrafted films made with precision and love, so we can show AI-obsessed executives and tech ghouls that human artistry is not dead despite all their efforts to kill it.
It starts, as so many great children’s adventure tales do, with a precocious girl. Green-eyed Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth) is itching to spread her wings, straining against the protectiveness of her two well-meaning, granola-eating, beanie-wearing Portland parents. When they leave her in charge for a day of her baby brother Mac with explicit instructions that they not leave the house, Prue has no intention of following orders. She heads out into the city on her bike, her bouncy brother trailing behind in a wagon, in search of adventure.
Adventure finds her when a murder of crows swoops in and steals her baby brother, whisking him into what Prue’s father calls the “impassable wilderness,” a misty thicket of Pacific Northwest forestry she was told never, ever, under any circumstances, to enter. Undeterred, headstrong Prue – joined by a stammering, bespectacled boy named Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who understandably has a bit of a crush on her – goes in search of her brother.
The impassable wilderness, she finds, hides magic – real magic. A whole kingdom with warring factions, talking animals, a magic tree and a bandit king. “I don’t know whether this is terrifying or adorable,” Prue says, taking in the anthropomorphic animals. The answer is both, because real magic also means dark magic. An exiled witch, Alexandra the dowager governess (Carey Mulligan), has gone mad with grief at the death of her son, and she will stop at nothing to get him back – even sacrificing Prue’s stolen brother to the dark arts.
On a pure craft level, “Wildwood” is a marvel. Adapted from the YA novel of the same name, scribed by Decemberists musician Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis, “Wildwood” is bursting with world-building, brought to life by stop-motion animators who crafted hundreds of practical puppets with changeable 3D-printed faces to capture the minutia of expression, frame by painstaking frame. Directed by Travis Knight, who also helmed Laika’s excellent Oscar-nominated feature “Kubo and the Two Strings,” with cinematography by six-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel (“The Right Stuff,” “The Passion of the Christ”), “Wildwood” looks incredible, its created universe full of both wonder and menace. Prue bursting through the clouds on the back of an eagle, its feathers glittering in shafts of sunlight, is breathtaking in its beauty.
This film is also at times shockingly dark, the way kid’s movies used to be. The film maximizes its PG-13 rating with bursts of violence, snarling wild animals, even dead children. There’s peril here, and real stakes – and with that the trust that the children watching will be able to handle it. If the story lacks a little in emotional connection, or if the magical world at times distractingly busy, it can be forgiven for the quality of craftsmanship and ambition on display. This recalls the great moody children’s films of the 1980s, like “Labyrinth” and “The NeverEnding Story” in its ease with magic and darkness; and Hayao Miyazaki too, films like “Princess Mononoke” and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” with their reverence and terror of the natural world.
At the risk of waxing melodramatic, “Wildwood” isn’t just a very good movie, it’s an adrenaline shot of hope straight to the heart that something like this can still get made. In a world awash in dead-eyed CGI and AI slop designs, “Wildwood” stands as a monument to human creativity.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
