Movie Review: Laika’s Stop-Motion Animation ‘Wildwood’

Seven years after its last release, stop-motion animation studio Laika has returned with Wildwood, an epic fantasy and its most ambitious film yet. Many of the headlines, however, focus on the movie’s lowish gross and billionaire backing. Nike cofounder Phil Knight owns the studio, and CEO and Wildwood director Travis Knight is his son, leading Fortune to call Laika “the anti-Skydance” and Bloomberg to describe Wildwood as “Nike Founder Son’s Latest Unprofitable Masterpiece” — a mixed compliment if there ever was one.

Meanwhile, the film’s PG-13 rating and dark aspects have drawn blowback from the social media contingent that believes all animated films should be suitable for young children. (Wildwood’s source material is a middle-grade novel by Decemberists front man Colin Meloy.) But Laika and Wildwood also have their passionate defenders.

The deal

Prue McKeel (voice of Peyton Elizabeth Lee) has hit the age (roughly 12) when a kid has a sarcastic rejoinder to everything. That includes her hippie parents; their protective fretting over her baby brother, Mac; and the magical metropolis of Portland, Ore., where they all reside.

Prue doesn’t believe in magic, and when she’s asked to watch Mac, she ignores her dad’s warnings and takes the baby on a wild jaunt downtown. It’s all in good fun — until a murder of crows swoops down and bears Mac away into a forest that locals call the Impassable Wilderness.

Determined to save her brother, Prue plows into this forbidden place, trailed by her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), a shy gamer with a hopeless crush on her. They soon find themselves smack in the middle of a war between the Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), an equestrienne witch warrior backed by an army of talking coyotes; and factions that include bureaucrats, giant birds and lovable bandits.

Alexandra, who’s on a grief-fueled revenge quest, would rather scourge the whole forest than accept the loss of her son. Mac is key to her plans, unless Prue, Curtis and their new friends can save him.

Will you like it?

Right before the end credits, Wildwood offers a lightning-fast montage of scenes from the making of the movie: crewmembers crafting puppets, positioning them on real sets and animating them by hand. The unspoken message couldn’t be clearer: People made this, and not with prompts.

Sure, some digital animation was also used in the epic, which features remarkably complex scenes of ground and airborne battle. But there’s a vividness and tactility to Wildwood that no pure computer animation — let alone AI — can approach. Exploring the autumnal splendor of the Impassable Wilderness, or watching expressions shift with humanlike speed on puppets’ lumpy faces, older viewers may be reminded of seeing Jim Henson’s animatronic masterpiece The Dark Crystal — and find themselves back in that state of childlike wonder.

Is Wildwood suitable for actual children? It opens with a young boy’s mysterious suicide (later contextualized) and includes battles in which likable supporting characters die, as well as countless extras. With a reckless streak and a chip on her shoulder, Prue is no role model; she endangers her brother and is casually mean to Curtis in early scenes. Many adults in the story aren’t much better — weak, scared, raging. Alexandra is downright twisted, a toxic blend of self-awareness and delusion, and the flashes of humor and seductive sweetness that Mulligan gives her just make her scarier.

Those ingredients add up to a rip-roaring good story in a dark vein, one that any older kid who enjoys Edward Gorey, early Tim Burton or “Welcome to Night Vale” should appreciate. As the rating indicates, Wildwood will scare the very young or sensitive. But viewers who are ready will eat it up — and a fantasy like this has no upper age limit.

Prue and Curtis may be flawed, but they’re also 12 — a harrowing life stage, as anyone who survived it can attest — and they grow over the course of the movie. While Prue’s quest itself is nothing new in the fantasy genre, her orneriness is fresh and welcome. (Seldom has an angry tween girl had so much screen time.) And the message that emerges from Knight and Meloy’s Portland fairy tale (via Chris Butler’s screenplay) is a nuanced and true one: The hardest part of adulthood is learning when to hold on and when to let go.

Wildwood itself is a case study in holding on — to human-made craft and the belief that people still have vital stories to pass down to future generations, forms of wisdom that an algorithm can’t sell or a machine replace. Surely that’s a better use of a billionaire’s spare change than, well, so many of the other options. Don’t let the Alexandras of the world win.

If you like this, try…

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016; Disney+, HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Knight’s previous directorial effort, a gorgeous animated adventure set in feudal Japan, is also a heartbreaking meditation on how stories help us process grief.

The Boxtrolls (2014; Disney+, HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): I also loved this Laika film about a human orphan adopted by a community of secretive creatures whom he must later save from his own kind. Kids who are introverted may feel a strong kinship to the shy, playful Boxtrolls.

Missing Link (2019; the CW, Fandango, Lionsgate+, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Tubi, rentable): Laika’s most recent and lowest-grossing film is this comic take on the Sasquatch mythos, set in the 19th-century Pacific Northwest, with Zach Galifianakis voicing Bigfoot as a gentle, bemused slacker. Kids who like the talking animals in Wildwood (Awkwafina as a smart-ass rat!) might really dig it.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Wildwood”