Alright, I haven’t been able to be upload pieces on here like I’ve wanted to do for the past month for personal life related reasons. Because of that, I’ve decided to started doing more mini-reviews on here so that I actually have free time AND you all get reviews of recent movies. I’ll still plan to do a more in-depth review every now and then whenever I have the time to do so but I would expect more short and quick-to-the-point reviews for right now. There’s just too much going on in my personal life right now to stay 100% focused on here.
But earlier this week, I attended the fan screening for Laika’s newest film Wildwood, a stop motion animated epic that is based of the 2011 novel of the same name by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis AND has been in development for 16 years. In the film, a teenage girl named Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and her classmate Curtis (Justin Tremblay) travel into an enchanted forest in search of her infant brother after he is abducted. They find a manor and learn about a coming war from a mysterious woman who tragically lost her son.
To get to the main point, Wildwood is yet another impressive achievement in terms of stop motion and animation from Laika studios. The narrative hook of a young girl going through the ends of the earth to save her baby brother and learning fascinating revolutions about him along the way is incredibly engaging and refreshing, there is not a single moment of art or craftsmanship that feels lazy and phoned in, the set pieces are among the best in any animated film in recent memory (the flying sequences make the original How To Train Your Dragon look tame in comparison), the entire voice cast, regardless of how big or small their roles are, bring their absolute A game, and the soundtrack by Dario Marianelli adds an extra layer to the film that it likely wouldn’t have had if it were in the hands of any other composer. If this film really took 16 years to get made like they say it did, then those were 16 years that were very well spent.
I don’t think it’s the very best from Laika Animation or up to the levels that Paranoman, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Coraline were. There are times where the pacing comes to a screeching halt in order to allow for more emotional moments to come into play during the middle stretch and the runtime can get on the wayside once we get to the second half of the film. There is also the resolution which makes sense in terms of arcs and themes but felt like it was missing an extra beat or two to really hit home, almost like it was requested from the studios to trim the runtime a hair so it doesn’t fall into the two and a half hour long trap that most live-action movies suffer from nowadays. None of these flaws are able to put a dagger on the film whatsoever but I DO think they do enough to prevent it from being the near flawless masterpieces of some of Laika’s other work. Then again, even middle-of-the-pack Laika far surpasses the middle-of-the-pack likes of say Illumination Animation and dare I say….modern Disney.
I should also give a big warning that this is NOT a film for young kids whatsoever. This is Laika’s very first PG-13 rated film and you can DEFINITELY tell. The very first scene of the film involves a naked child committing suicide for crying out loud! (No, there’s nothing too graphic about that moment but it perfectly sets the dark tone the film has going for!) Wildwood contains it’s fair share of cruelty and mild haunting imagery such as strong fantasy violence, mild bloody scenes, and a couple of characters saying some naughty words.
There is just NO way in hell that you can sell this movie as just being another hard PG rated movie like Laika’s previous work or even the kind of PG movies that studios had back in the 1970s and 1980s before PG-13 was even a thing! Coraline was able to operate perfectly as being little Johnny’s very first horror film. For the most part, Wildwood is able to operate as little Johnny’s very first stop motion epic, giving the glimpse feeling of what it felt like to be in the same cultural wave as The Lord of the Rings back in the early 2000s. Just make sure he has a parent with him in the movie theaters!
After hearing that this film took 16 years to make, I can’t help but think how far we have come since 2010, for both better or worse. While animation has been taking into new heights and it has now become a medium that is able to push the storytelling boundaries you couldn’t possibly imagine back before 2010, we also have seen AI come into affect since then, coming to terms with the fact that the days of actual craftmanship in film are being numbered as each passing day goes on. Wildwood is proof that pure art and craftmanship still holds strongly to this day and stands up anything that robots could do.
I’m sorry but you can NOT tell me that ChatGPT, Claw, Grok, or any other AI generated slop would be able to top the whimsical and wonder of every flying sequence with the birds, the enhancing world building of Wildwood, the dramatic and emotional scenes with Prue and her entire family, or even the (slightly) overlong yet still equally amusing subplot with Curtis trying to prove his worth to a girl he likes in class. I’m sure it can give a slight hand in detecting bugs and errors but that’s it and that’s the way it should be. (Or if you ask director Travis Knight, it shouldn’t be a way…..at all).
When that day comes and we see that it is no longer possible for any film production to function without having AI involved, I can only imagine that I will view Wildwood in the same spotlight that I do with ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Coraline, as being among the last remains of a golden era of animation and filmmaking. Still, even when Laika is not quite perfect, it still leaps and bounds ahead of plenty other animation studios working today. And Wildwood is certainly no exception to that!
But for now, I will give this film a very strong 3.5 out of 4 stars but put a pin in there for a potential 4 out of 4 stars for the near future.
