5 Movies To Watch If You Like Wildwood

"Wildwood" may have not broken any box office records, but if you saw it, chances are you fell in love with LAIKA Studios' latest stop-motion fantasy. The numbers speak for themselves, with an A Cinemascore rating from polled audiences, and a 97% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes that very nearly equals the staggering 100% fresh rating from critics, including our own. It was already the frontrunner for the best animated feature Oscar – which would become the studio's first, even though all their movies have been nominated — but the passionate responses suggest it may already be a lock for the win.

For those of you who haven't delved deep into the studio's all-killer, no-filler filmography, who hadn't experienced any of their enchanting gothic epics until "Wildwood," then you've got a whole world of incredible animation to explore. For this piece, however, we're spreading our net further than their previous work, looking beyond LAIKA to other enchanting stop-motion and traditionally animated fantasies, as well as darker coming-of-age stories that you'll love if you're on this movie's wavelength. Start with LAIKA's back catalogue – we've helpfully ranked all six of their films here — and then come back for a further animation education.

Travis Knight gives nepo babies a good name. LAIKA's CEO may be the heir to a billion-dollar dynasty through his Nike co-founder father Mike, but he's always followed his artistic muse rather than his business acumen and is responsible for creating two of the studio's darkest epics. "Wildwood" arrives a full decade after his directorial debut "Kubo and the Two Strings," another lavishly created fantasy tale that disappointed at the box office due to being more challenging for younger audiences than the typical Hollywood studio animated fare. 

The 12-year-old protagonist (voiced by Art Parkinson) only has one eye, as the other was snatched by his grandfather (Ralph Fiennes) when he was a baby — and that's before he's forced onto a quest to save his village and his mother (Charlize Theron), who has been captured by her evil twin sisters (Rooney Mara).

Although inspired by the mix of unsparing brutality and escapist fantasy in films like Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke," Knight's film is far more than just a love letter to the anime which influenced it. Even on a pure technical level, it takes inspiration from multiple traditional forms of Japanese animation — from origami to ink wash paintings — and incorporates them into stop-motion in a thoroughly modern, endlessly inventive way. 

It's the rare animated film to receive a best visual effects nomination at the Oscars, and its bold stylistic choices are so carefully integrated, you'd be forgiven for not realizing just how cutting edge they are. If "Wildwood" was your first LAIKA movie, then this brutal coming-of-age tale is the most ideal movie in their back catalogue for you to seek out next.

"Coraline" may be LAIKA's biggest smash hit, but it's still the only time the studio has produced a feature by stop-motion legend Henry Selick, and it took more than a decade for his follow-up effort to finally reach our screens. The long journey to the screen is even more surprising considering that Selick co-wrote the movie – based on his own unpublished novel – with the help of Jordan Peele, who, alongside his comedy partner Keegan Michael-Key, voice the demons at the story's center.

However, the difficulty in summarizing the chaotic plot of "Wendell and Wild" is the likeliest factor in how the movie took so long to appear, and why it struggled to find an audience. Fans of LAIKA's gothic adventures will want to get lost in this world regardless of how well they can follow the plot.

In simplest terms, Wendell and Wild are two demons who dream of building an amusement park, and have previously created hair cream that can bring the dead back to life. After having visions of orphaned troubled teen Kat (Lyric Ross), they make a false promise to bring her parents back from the dead if she agrees to summon them. However, this goes too far, and multiple deceased council members are revived, voting to destroy their town to build a larger prison. Did we forget to mention this story is also a critique of the prison industrial complex, in a way that links back to Kat's personal trauma? "Wendell and Wild" is hard to summarize (we don't blame you if you need an explainer), but its playful storytelling and punk attitude are infectious.

The Irish studio Cartoon Saloon are one of the most reliable animation houses in the world, but even with multiple Oscar-nominated movies to their name, they don't have a cult following that compares to LAIKA's. This is a shame, because their brand of dark fairytales inspired by Irish folklore, like their 2020 film "Wolfwalkers," are brought to life with gorgeous hand-drawn animation, and they should be the next obsession for anyone enchanted by the stop-motion of "Wildwood."

Co-directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, "Wolfwalkers" whisks viewers to Ireland in 1650 under English colonial rule, where a newly arrived hunter (Sean Bean) has been ordered by the authoritarian ruler Lord Protector (Simon McBurney) to clear the woods surrounding the city of Kilkenny of all wolves.

The hunter's daughter Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) secretly follows her father into the woods where amid danger she meets Mebh (Eva Whittaker), a young girl who claims to be a Wolfwalker; someone whose spirit leaves their body every night in the form of a wolf. Robyn's dad doesn't believe that this community is peacefully co-existing with ours, and more trouble brews when the ruler initiates plans to burn down the forest — something complicated because Robyn herself has been accidentally bitten and transformed into a Wolfwalker.

It's an enchanting fable that speaks to modern day intolerance and felt particularly timely upon release, when the legacy of colonialism was brought back into the cultural conversation, and older audiences found just as much to chew on as younger ones. It's Cartoon Saloon's crowning achievement to date.

After his two Charlie Kaufman collaborations, "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," few would expect Spike Jonze to follow those surreal indie companion pieces with a big-budget children's movie, especially one adapted from one of the most beloved picture books of them all. 

Jonze's take on "Where the Wild Things Are" is less a movie for children than it is a story about the childhood imagination, expanding upon the slim 40-page source material to turn 8-year-old Max's (Max Records) journey into the land of the Wild Things into something less whimsical. This is a movie about being on the precipice of adult emotion for the first time, with Max entering the fantasy world after lashing out at his older sister for not stopping her friends teasing him, and at his mom (Catherine Keener) for spending more time with her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) than her only son.

He may still have a wild rumpus with the Wild Things, but Jonze's characterizations of the cuddly creatures — voiced by a murderer's row of extraordinary character actors, including James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara — skew towards the sad, and are far more reflective of the young protagonist's confused mental state. 

The movie very narrowly made its $100 million budget back at the box office, with the somber tone proving as alienating to some as it was enchanting to others; it was reported Warner Bros. were long concerned about the movie being unsuitable for children. That might be a stretch to say, but just like "Wildwood," this is a coming-of-age fantasy best appreciated by those who have already gone through those growing pains and come out the other side.

In the early 1970s, the Walt Disney corporation turned down the rights to adapt the children's sci-fi/fantasy film "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH." This was the best thing that could have happened, actually, as a decade later, it was brought to the screen by animator Don Bluth. 

"The Secret of NIMH" deviates from its source novel in several ways, but felt groundbreaking for American animation at this time, weaving in mature themes like animal testing and genuinely fearsome villains into a traditional hand-drawn fantasy worthy of Disney's golden age. It wasn't a smash success right out of the gate, but you can feel its influence on many masterpieces in the years that followed, with the darker ideas commonplace in the Texan animator's work an obvious precursor to LAIKA's modern masterpieces.

Another reason it was rejected by Disney was because they already had too many mice in their filmography, leaving no space for Mrs. Brisby (Elizabeth Hartman), the widowed field mouse facing a race-against-time to move from her home ahead of plowing season. One of her young sons has fallen ill with pneumonia, meaning they can't leave for three more weeks, so she enlists the help of a colony of superintelligent rats, who gained their strengths after being experimented on by humans they quickly grew smarter than. It's equal parts whimsical and intense, with the threat of death hovering around the story's margins just like it does in "Wildwood" — every animation fan needs to have seen it.