Wildwood review – Stop-motion animation pushed into unexplored territory

If you need an indication of the nature and tone of new stop-motion animated film Wildwood —from Coraline, ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings makers Laika – in the film’s opening moments, a miserable young boy strips naked, breaks open his chest to find a clockwork heart and promptly jumps off a manor balcony, committing suicide in front of his devastated mother.

Translation: this is dark stuff. Like fantasy films of the 1980s, and the animated films of the same period, Wildwood is a movie with consequence. No manic slapstick or catchy, colourful music numbers here. Characters can die suddenly, with zero chance of return, and the emotional turmoil that plagues heroes and villains alike is unusually complex.

Put another way, Wildwood is sophisticated inside and out. In development for sixteen years – with work beginning a week after Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s illustrated YA fantasy novel hit bookstores – this 132-minute fantasy epic is a technological marvel, pushing the capabilities of stop-motion to its apex (with some CGI enhancements). We’re talking large-scale crowd scenes and Braveheart-style pitched running battles, meticulously manipulated into place by hand, and so buttery smooth in their movements that you may struggle to accept they’ve been created frame by frame. The film is about as anti-AI in its artistry as they come, with a smattering of overt callouts to that fact onscreen.

As for Wildwood’s plot, it centres on Portland, Oregon adolescent Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), who’s at that age where she rolls her eyes at her hippie parents’ folk tales about the Impassable Wilderness on their city’s borders. Prue discovers the stories are true, though, when she takes her baby brother Mac outside to play – against her parents’ wishes – and he’s abducted by crows, which whisk Mac off to the forest. With geeky classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) in tow, Prue finds a way through the ivy that separates our world from Wildwood, and the pair find themselves in a magic-touched realm shaken by the conflict between the Bandits, headed by Mahershala Ali’s Brendan, and dowager governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) with her vicious coyote army.

Much as he did with his live-action Masters of the Universe earlier this year, and 2018 Transformers prequel Bumblebee, director Travis Knight has a special talent for harking back to previous eras of onscreen entertainment, without it feeling like clunky pastiche. You’ll identify the influence of things like Labyrinth, The Secret of NIMH, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, but Wildwood still retains its own identity – which, for the record, is not relentlessly grim, but definitely not for very young children. It also demonstrates the progressive attitudes of previous Laika films, with things like LGBT representation and an ethnically diverse cast all having a matter-of-fact, uncommented place in the movie.

The only problem with Wildwood is that, as an adaptation of a 540+ page novel, it has a lot of moving parts. Early on, Prue and Curtis are separated, going on vastly different adventures and meeting a variety of characters, and that contributes to a lack of focus. While it’s easy to latch affection into certain figures, outside of Prue and Alexandra, little time is given to fleshing out the rest of the substantial cast. The same goes for the film’s themes, which brush against the topics like parental authority undermined by selfish mistakes, toxic grief and the dangers of optimistic inaction, but never really get a fingers-in, deep exploration.

Still, there’s no denying that Wildwood is a feat of animation artistry like no other. While you have contemporary animated rivals like the SpiderVerse films, KPop Demon Hunters, and the recent Forgotten Island playing with multiple different visual approaches, Wildwood goes the opposite direction and hyper-focuses on one animation style – pushing the medium into new territory in such a way that viewers’ brains are often tricked into thinking they’re watching something else.

You can expect the film’s reputation, like the other boundary-pushing, mature works of Laika, to spread and strengthen over time, much like Wildwood’s ivy.

Wildwood had its cinema debut in South Africa on 23 October.