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Wildwood Review
Image Credit: Fathom Entertainment
Loading...I recently watched Coraline for the very first time.
I quite enjoyed it, but I wasn’t enamored of it. I scored it as “Very Good”, with 3.5 stars on a 5 star scale (Letterboxd). It was obviously superbly crafted, and I had a hard time lodging legitimate complaints against it, but I didn’t find it within me to love it as much as many others have.
So when the newest productions from Laika Studios–the hands and minds behind Coraline–came out, I didn’t think loads of it other than that it was probably very beautiful, and at first, I was content to leave it at that.
But after Wildwood’s opening weekend, the reviews started pouring in, and I realized I was missing something special. So even though it meant taking what should have been a day of rest–the day after Halloween–as a day out, I had to go check it out on week two.
Wildwood took years to create, and at the time of its release, it’s the longest stop-motion movie ever made. That’s not nothing. It integrates CGI and not all of the visuals are purely stop-motion, but we’ll talk more about that in the Ups and Downs.
The story here is of Prue, a middle school aged girl growing up in Portland with her younger brother, Mac. Her father regularly warns her of the peril of the nearby woods, but Prue, entering her disaffected years, mostly blows this off.
When her parents leave her alone with Mac one day, she disobeys their wishes to stay indoors, and she takes him out with her for a day on the town. The two run into a classmate of Prue’s named Curtis, and the three end up finding themselves at a park so Mac can play.
Shortly into their trip, though, an enormous flock of crows appears and makes off with Mac! Prue hops on her bike and chases them across town before seeing that they have entered the woods. What will she find when she goes against her dad’s wishes and enters them to save Mac?
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ Outside of the Spider-Verse movies, this is the most visually stunning film I have ever seen. It’s a treat for the senses. The combination of stop-motion and CGI is breathtakingly outstanding. At first, and for a while as I watched Wildwood, I was disappointed that they used computer generated images in addition to Laika’s typical stop-motion puppetry work. But as the film wore on, I grew to accept it more and more. The stop-motion is the meat and potatoes of the flick, after all; the CGI is just the side salad that brightens up the meal and makes everything more flawless.
Additionally, Wildwood is over two hours long. There’s no wonder it took so many years to produce. Previous stop-motion movies like Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas are relatively short productions because the animation requires so much time and precision and energy. Wildwood, however, does not cut corners on its story in its making. That’s wildly impressive.
Speaking of the story…
+ In addition to a spectacle of visual effects, Wildwood has a brilliant tale. It would have been so easy to rest on the stop-motion laurels and told a simple fairytale, but the filmmakers went all out for this.
Wildwood is a fairytale for sure, but there is real depth to the character work and the storyline. Prue is a very sympathetic young girl who endears herself to the audience extraordinarily well. Alexandra is a complex but threatening villain who is diabolical but also has a history that makes her more than your typical “evil for evil’s sake” ne’er-do-well. Curtis is a fun sidekick. The animal characters are enjoyable and entertaining.
The story, I note again that Wildwood’s runtime exceeds two hours, lets everyone in the cast shine. It has some basic fable story beats–a plucky child finds her true destiny and inner strength in a mystical world–but there are twists and turns that are hard to predict but fit well with everything you have watched to the point where they are revealed. It’s a great tale; what more can I say?
– The governor is initially set up as at least a secondary antagonist for the picture, but he is then just written out and done nothing with. He does at least come back to get some comeuppance at the very end, but after what we see from him early on in the picture, I just expected that he would float around the plot throughout and mess with Prue’s attempts to save her brother.
None of this is to say, or even imply, that Alexandra needed help on the villainy front in Wildwood. She was superb. It’s just that the lack of the governor felt like a rare missed opportunity!
– A second down for this wonderful picture. Hmmm. Tough! But I’ll say every time Jake Johnson’s character spoke, it DID make me wish I was watching a Spider-Verse movie. He didn’t really do a different voice at all from his Peter Parker in those efforts. If you are going to cast a star over an unknown voice talent, that star should at least disguise their usual vocal inflections and try to perform. We don’t get that from Johnson.
