It’s moronic. General Western perceptions that animation is only “for children” and can “only” tell certain stories are preposterous. Anyone witnessing titles like Flee, It's Such a Beautiful Day, Whisper of the Heart, Penguin's Memory: A Tale of Happiness, or Perfect Blue (among countless other titles) knows all too well that animation is a medium housing all kinds of stories. Yet that perception festers. This sometimes creates a tragic feedback loop, where American animated features dilute their most audacious or heavier impulses to fit mainstream visions of what animated features “should” look like.
I’m so glad director Travis Knight and the Laika crew threw such creative insecurity to the wind. Their latest stop-motion animated production, Wildwood, follows its own creative drum. It has no time for what focus groups or studio executives consider “proper” American animated cinema. It’s much more enamored with sweeping, classical fantasy storytelling.
Based on the 2011 Wildwood novel penned and illustrated by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, respectively, Chris Butler's script begins in Portland, Oregon. Teenager Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is growing up. She's convinced that it's time to let go of believing in the fantastical. That's easier said than done since her parents, Mr. and Mrs. McKeel (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine), insist magic exists in the nearby forests. Prue instead focuses on taking care of her baby brother Mac, whom she takes out to see Portland one normal day whilst her parents visit a craft fair.
A montage of Prue and Mac riding around their home and seeing trains, used bookstores, and various Portland denizens immediately establishes entrancing specificity into Wildwood. Stop-motion’s innately lived-in qualities make this city so cozy and endearing. No actual Portland tourism ad could make this place look more inviting. Plus, this sequence establishes an “anything’s possible” aura to Prue and Mac’s surroundings (you never know who you might run into on Portland’s streets, after all) even before they encounter witches and chattering woodland critters.
Things swerve into the fantastical when crows carry away Mac into that forbidden forest. She and her skittish acquaintance Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) press onward to rescue the endangered baby. The duo hasn’t just stepped into a world of bipedal, talking animals and bandits. They’ve also unwittingly stumbled into dowager governess Alexandra’s (Carey Mulligan) plans to take over the forest. Meanwhile, Wildwood’s various populations (birds, hoity-toity folks, bandits, farmers, etc.) can’t stand each other. In the middle of everything is a girl wanting her brother back.
Every ounce of praise you’ve heard for Wildwood’s visuals is true and then some. Knight, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, and an army of stop-motion animators imbue Wildwood with towering imagery. Even quiet wide shots depicting Prue and Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal) standing on a balcony are gorgeously composed and littered with luscious orange autumn leaves. More theatrically composed images, meanwhile, embrace draping villains in evocative shadows, characters navigating fields of corpses, or heroic figures standing on a hilltop with warm light breaking over their shoulders. These lavish frames evoke eye-catching covers for mid-20th century fantasy texts more than the cramped iPhone-ready imagery dominating so many post-2010 fantasy films.
All these luscious visuals materialize via the magic of stop-motion animation. There’s no end to the awe-inspiring feats and images conjured up through this immediately tactile medium. However, especially impressive is Wildwood’s physical acting. There’s a moment when Alexandra clutches her breath recounting to Curtis about her lost son. This dialogue-free expression of her immense interior pain is so deftly realized. These affecting displays of nonverbal communication come from a medium where artists take several photos of a clay puppet in various poses (all to create a single second of footage) and repeat the process ad nauseum.
On paper, that sounds like it could create jagged physicality. Anyone who’s seen Mary & Max or Fantastic Mr. Fox (among countless other stop-motion gems) knows, though, that this medium is like a magic trick. So many disparate pieces and artistic contributions coalesce into glorious wonders. Wildwood is a large-scale testament to that magic. Here, uber-smooth character movements ensure complex emotions underneath these figures are even easier to absorb.
Plus, Laika’s animation team (here led by Florian Perinelle and Rachelle Lambden) have gotten astonishingly skilled at minute body language. Alexandra and Prue’s parents especially have such aching and weary physicality reflecting their decades of experience.
Wildwood’s backgrounds are also magnificently tactile and engrossing. Happily, a cinematic ode to the natural world makes these leafy tableaus look so radiant. Butler’s script also gives the animators lots of wiggle room to give each Wildwood domain a distinct aesthetic. One farm-oriented area has a warmer, autumn vibe, for instance, while a bureaucratic realm has a more restrained color palette. Whatever ambiance Wildwood channels, it all looks wondrous through exemplary stop-motion artistry.
As a visual feast and an extraordinary expansion of what stop-motion cinema can be, Wildwood is sensational. However, this enterprise also excels as a bittersweet coming-of-age story. Prue yearns to grow up, to secure a sense of security and maturity currently eluding her. Yet her journey through Wildwood isn’t about a fantasy realm providing wish-fulfillment escapism. It’s instead a vessel for her discovering adults who’re insecure, unsure of what to do, and decidedly imperfect. In this regard, Wildwood echoes Minari and The Florida Project in depicting a child forcibly discovering that the adults around her are messy human beings.
No matter how outlandish the proceedings get, Butler’s writing and especially Peyton Elizabeth Lee’s voice-over acting always reinforce Prue’s down-to-Earth qualities. That crucial normalcy makes Wildwood’s melancholy impulses really hit home. We all learn the world’s an inescapably and often overwhelmingly complex place in our teenager years. Prue just happened to do it in a place housing bank teller pigs.
Reinforcing Prue and Curtis as everyday teens also yields the benefit of enhancing the tension of various suspense-driven sequences. Their youth-informed vulnerability is clear (plus they inhabit a movie where people get stabbed and shot to death on-screen), so it’s genuinely uncertain what fate will befall them when tension ratchets up. Speaking of memorable Wildwood set pieces, Travis Knight and company deliver a phenomenal third-act battle sequence that makes the classic Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies proud (not just because it deftly darts between simultaneous perspectives and storylines).
The way new obstacles, allies, and enemies keep appearing throughout this sequence had me utterly locked in. Rather than coming off as needlessly busy, the persistent escalation of scope and hurdles instead feels deeply organic. It helps that the artists bringing this material to life (including Christopher Murrie's crisp editing and Dario Marianelli's pulse-pounding score) are in such bombastic rare form. If only more live-action tentpoles demonstrated this showmanship in their respective finales.
Even when Wildwood’s in a quieter mode, that artistry persists. A low-key conversation between Prue and wise owl (voiced by Richard E. Grant), for instance, is still chock full of lovely voice acting and richly detailed animation. This pervasive craftsmanship informs a richly audacious film. Every artist assembled here swung for the fences. In the process, they delivered an exercise so transportive that not even the umpteenth Awkwafina voice-over role could capsize. Animation is a medium that can tell any story for any audience. Wildwood reinforces that truth in visually spectacular terms.
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