Wildwood Review: Stop-Motion Animation Has Never Looked More Beautiful

Every now and then, a team of animators gets to spend way more time than usual on concocting the most beautiful images you've ever seen. Studio Ghibli spent seven years animating Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron." Disney worked eight years on "Sleeping Beauty."  Katsuhiro Otomo's "Steamboy" took a decade, Phil Tippett's "Mad God" took three decades, and Richard Williams never even finished "The Thief and the Cobbler." "Wildwood," which has been in development at LAIKA since 2011 and started filming in 2021, joins this short list of impossible accomplishments, making it a must-see for animation fans.

The question going in was whether "Wildwood" would also be a must-see for anyone not already in love with the art and craft of stop-motion animation. Aside from "The Boy and the Heron," these take-forever cartoons have generally been much less notable for their storytelling than for their artistic and technical accomplishments. So it's a relief to find out that "Wildwood" has a strong, exciting, emotionally sophisticated story backing its next-level visual beauty, making it easy to recommend to just about anyone.

Anyone, that is, except for young children. "Wildwood" isn't "adult animation," exactly (it's based on a children's book by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis), but that PG-13 should be taken seriously. If LAIKA's PG horror toons like "Coraline" and "Paranorman" pushed the limits of what kids could handle, then "Wildwood," which opens with a robot possessed by the soul of a dead child dying a second time by suicide and goes on to showcase the most intense animated war scenes this side of "Princess Mononoke," could scar them for life. Older kids and the young at heart, on the other hand, might just have a new favorite.

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Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), the teenage daughter of Portland hipsters (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine), isn't supposed to bring her baby brother Mac (Arthur Knight) outside. She's broken this rule enough times to think her parents are worried for no reason, but one day while she's carrying her brother around town, a murder of crows kidnaps him. Seeking to rescue her brother, Prue and her nerdy friend Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) venture into the Impassible Wilderness, where they find a magical realm in the midst of an epic war.

The set-up is reminiscent of the cult classic "Labyrinth" crossed with "The Lord of the Rings." Instead of a tower with a big eye or David Bowie with big balls, our villain here is a more complicated and sympathetic figure: Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), a once respected ruler whose obsessive pursuit of resurrecting her dead son has turned her toward dark magic. Prue and Curtis get separated by Alexandra's coyote soldiers early on, and Curtis is tempted by Alexandra's promises to make him a heroic warrior like in his role-playing games before realizing what such a life actually entails. When Alexandra gives her inevitable "we're not so different" villain speech to Prue, it's one that actually leaves Prue shaken thinking about it — what is the line between two people willing to do anything out of love for family?

Mulligan is a stand-out in an all-around excellent voice acting ensemble. Mahershala Ali's performance as the Bandit King (his second time this fall playing a criminal trying to protect a baby, after his moving work in "Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother") reminds us why Ali should be in everything and just how badly Marvel fumbled "Blade." Angela Bassett does the thing as the General of the Avian Principality, the movie's answer to everyone's questions about why the eagles didn't do more in "LotR," while Richard E. Grant alters his distinctive voice just enough you might not even realize he's playing the prince Owl Rex. Even the celebrities who show up in every cartoon — well duh, of course Awkwafina and Charlie Day are here because why wouldn't they be — are utilized well. I loved exploring the world of Wildwood and meeting all its inhabitants ... which meant I cared when some of them either die or have extremely close calls with death.

How wild is it that this movie's director, Travis Knight, and screenwriter, Chris Butler, also released the utterly mediocre "Masters of the Universe" in the same year? The weird thing is I can kind of see how the same sensibilities informed both movies: there's a shared love of epic fantasy, a rejection of pressure to put away childish things, a conflicted view on how violence is best avoided but also sometimes necessary. Yet "Wildwood" expresses those same perspectives with far more clarity. When it's silly, it's not overly self-conscious about said silliness, and when it's serious, it doesn't pull its punches.

It's not perfect. Prue's "I don't believe in magic" conversations get repetitive; after a certain point, "belief" seems like the least of what she should worry about. Some of the anthropomorphic animal gags are a bit too obvious and "Zootopia"-esque. While I think Wildwood is supposed to be a different universe rather than a hidden part of Portland, introducing the area as impassible to Oregon's first settlers before revealing a very "settler" culture inside this "ancient" realm is sure to spark some criticism (for what its worth, the mystic Iphigenia is played by Indigenous actress Tantoo Cardinal). But these are all very minor issues.

The battle scenes in the film's final act are a full-blown cinematic magic trick. I don't know how they did it and I'm not sure I want to. I know they couldn't do such big scenes entirely in stop-motion — WETA did CG VFX enhancements — but I couldn't tell you where the stop-motion ends and the CGI begins. And to pull off even a fraction of those scenes frame-by-frame with physical puppets, with that much camera movement from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel? The mind boggles.

Early on while Prue bikes around town, an art vendor has a sign reading, "Enjoy hand-crafted art, while it still exists." Even with Knight's Nike nepo-baby money, I don't know how long LAIKA can keep making films like this, or if they'll ever do anything as ambitious as "Wildwood" again. Enjoy it, while it still exists.

"Wildwood" opens in theaters on October 23.