Laika’s sixth studio film overall and its first stop-motion animated effort in seven years, Wildwood, may just be its most ambitious. Wildwood, Laika’s sixth studio film overall and its first stop-motion animated effort in seven years, may be its most ambitious. It might also be its best. At two hours and ten minutes, it’s certainly the longest for Laika itself and for stop-motion efforts in general. Wildwood is also the first Laika production to receive a PG-13 rating, a clear indication that children aren’t necessarily the intended audience: Adults with a keen interest in fantasy-adventure and, of course, stop-motion animation are.
Wildwood opens in stunningly dark fashion, as a forlorn boy dives feet first from the upper floor of a 19th-century mansion to the unforgiving ground below. As locals gather and discover the boy’s true identity: He’s no child; he’s a cleverly constructed automaton — the locals angrily turn against his “mother,” and the sorcery she used to bring her dead son back from the dead. The locals temporarily upend the social order, dooming the unnamed woman to a life of permanent exile and perpetual bereavement.
That tone-setting opening almost immediately gives way to a cheerier present-day scene in Portland, Oregon. Not coincidentally, Laika’s headquarters are located outside Portland. The writer, Colin Meloy, and illustrator, Carson Ellis, who wrote the source material, an illustrated novel published in 2011, also hail from Portland. It’s not surprising then that Laika lovingly recreated nearby Portland, one of the Pacific Northwest’s most beautiful cities, including, but not limited to, Portland’s sprawling residential neighborhoods, abundant public parks, and quirky, idiosyncratic commercial areas, for Wildwood.
Wildwood centers on Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teen entering her rebellious years. Bristling at her granola-fed parents’ (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) directive to stay at home with her infant brother, Mac (Arthur Knight), while they run errands, Prue does the exact opposite. She gently drops him into a wagon attached to her bicycle and heads out into the world. At a local cafe, she encounters Curtis Mahlberg (Jacob Tremblay), a classmate she’s deemed uncool and thus unworthy of her company. Curtis, however, inevitably proves useful when a murder of crows suddenly descends from the skies, kidnaps Mac, and flies into the so-called “Impassable Wilderness” abutting Portland proper.
Prue does what any sibling would do under similar circumstances: She doesn’t think; she reacts, pursuing the crows into the densely overgrown forest. Even with Curtis at her side, she loses Mac and the crows in the dense overhead foliage. More trouble arrives in the form of mostly bipedal, talking coyotes cosplaying as Napoleonic-era soldiers. They’re not friends; they’re foes, and soon enough, Prue and Curtis find themselves on different paths, albeit with the same goal: Rescuing Mac and returning home.
While Prue hitches a ride with a kindly postmaster (Len Cariou), who points her in the direction of one of the wilderness’s rulers, an ineffectual governor drowning in Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Curtis isn’t quite as fortunate. A coyote contingent grabs Curtis before he can escape. The coyotes forcibly escort their new captive to an underground warren where their de facto leader, Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), finalizes her plans for a battle that will decide a long-simmering conflict between the various factions that rule parts of the Impassable Wilderness.
Echoing C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Alexandra puts the moves on a nervous, eager-to-please Curtis, convincing him to join her forces and fight by her side. But war in Wildwood isn’t a tabletop RPG (role-playing game) with plastic figurines, cardboard maps, or a game-deciding throw of the die. Curtis isn’t ready for what he witnesses when Alexandra brings him to a battlefield piled high with both the barely living and the long dead, including Brendan (Mahershala Ali), the leader of forest-dwelling bandits opposed to Alexandra’s authoritarian rule, and a handful of survivors.
Prue’s misadventures in the Impassable Wilderness prove far less dark than Curtis’s, but no less frustrating. Tossed in prison as an outsider, Prue has to rely on the help of the so-called Avian Principality and a winged general (Angela Bassett) to evade Alexandra and her troops and find allies to help her find her brother. As Prue repeatedly discovers, it’s much more difficult than she imagined: The adults she encounters have their own problems, and Mac’s rescue isn’t one of them. Driven by tribalism and factionalism, the adults Prue encounters can’t get past their own differences, let alone unite in a coalition to resist Alexandra’s plans for total control of the Impassable Wilderness.
Working from Laika’s largest production budget to date, director Travis Knight (Masters of the Universe, Bumblebee, Kubo and the Two Strings) and a production team that encompasses set builders, costume makers, and puppeteers (among others) go all out, delivering spectacle unseen in stop-motion animation. The final battle features hundreds of human and non-human characters fighting in, around, and above a ravine. Alexandra equips her coyote army with muskets, bayonets, and cannons. Their under-equipped opponents have pre-industrial armor, swords, and arrows on theirs.
Knight and his Laika team gave themselves a seemingly impossible challenge: Introduce an entirely new, lore-heavy fantasy world, more than two hundred characters of varying types and species, exponentially increase the complexity of their set-piece game, and somehow keep Prue, Mac, and Curtis at the center of it all. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes, Wildwood stumbles narratively, especially when it ping-pongs between Prue’s story and Curtis’s and back again. That constant shift in perspective negatively impacts dramatic momentum, but thankfully, those shifts, while not few or far between, are negligible in comparison to Wildwood taken as a whole and not in parts.
Wildwood opens theatrically on Friday, October 23rd, via Laika Studios and Fathom Entertainment. Check the official site for local showtimes.
