Wildwood Is A Soaring Achievement Of Animation
Travis Knight’s new stop-motion animated film is a new pinnacle for the medium.
A mysterious forest. A kidnapped child. An evil sorceress. They’re all the ingredients of the kind of classic fantasy epic that has been the staple of children’s stories for eons: Labyrinth, The Last Unicorn, The Neverending Story — you name it.
But what else is there to do with this formula? How can one possibly make it novel in a landscape crowded with high-concept, high-speed animated movies? LAIKA, the stop-motion animation studio behind such acclaimed films as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, has wisely decided that, instead of chasing the tide, it will create its own waves. And its latest film from Kubo director Travis Knight, the breathtaking new fantasy epic Wildwood, is a triumphant tidal wave for the medium.
Based on Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis's 2011 novel of the same name, Wildwood follows Portland, Oregon teenager Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) on a quest to rescue her baby brother Mac after he’s kidnapped by a murder of crows. The crows take Mac deep into the Impassible Wilderness, a magical forest on the fringes of the city, which she and her nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) somehow manage to enter. Inside the forest, they find strange, fantastical things: talking coyotes dressed like 19th-century soldiers, warrior bandits, giant talking birds, and magical ivy with sinister properties. But looming over all is Alexandra (a delightfully menacing Carey Mulligan), the Dowager Governess and a dark sorceress whose grief over her dead son has led her to plunge the entirety of Wildwood into war.
Wildwood is a densely packed epic, with a scope that rivals some of the greatest fantasy franchises of our day. In fact, it feels somewhat miraculous that so much story is packed into a film that moves as briskly as Wildwood does. Much of that credit goes to screenwriter Chris Butler, who brilliantly condenses Meloy’s dense tome into a sleek adventure that never feels too weighed down by its lore, with the deft employment of a handful of flashbacks and breezy exposition dumps.
At 131 minutes long, Wildwood is the longest stop-motion animated film ever, but none of those minutes ever drag. Perhaps it’s because Knight, who returns to animation after a brief stopover in live-action for Masters of the Universe and Bumblebee, brings over some of that blockbuster spectacle that he picked up — but supercharged in the way that only animation can achieve. A handful of chase scenes move so propulsively and superhumanly that they feel only possible in this medium; though it’s so smooth and seamless that it almost loses that handmade quality that has always been the standard of stop-motion. And there’s certainly a grand ambition to Wildwood that previous LAIKA films only managed to brush up against — sweeping battle scenes recall Lord of the Rings or Braveheart, and a few surprising flashes of violence also feel reminiscent of those adult fantasy epics (as the rare PG-13 animated movie, Wildwood certainly lives up to that rating).
Curtis finds himself taken in by the Dowager Governess Alexandra.
But as dark, adult, and immaculate as its ambitions are, Wildwood still embraces the imperfections of its medium; Prue’s mop of hair is just stiff enough to remind you that she’s a handmade puppet, while the more fantastical flying scenes push the boundaries of physics enough to remind you that you’re watching something hand-crafted. While the animation moves as smoothly as a CG-animated film, Knight will throw in a few uncanny sequences where the frame rate slows down to create that choppy, old-fashioned stop-motion feeling. Certain little quirks remind you why Knight — and LAIKA — have such a steadfast loyalty to stop-motion and its beautiful limitations. But when Prue soars over Wildwood on the back of the majestic, noble giant eagle known only as the General (Angela Bassett), it’s still easy to have your breath taken away by the film’s dazzling vistas, lit by a dreamy, diffused light that feels like it would be impossible to achieve in a stop-motion animated movie. It’s enough to make you marvel that human hands could have made something so otherworldly.
To break down every single beautiful detail of animation in the film would take all day (the eagle’s feathers!), but let it be said that Wildwood is a stunning feat of animation — even more so because it could only have been animated in stop-motion. Its classic fantasy story, tied with its use of the oldest animated medium, somehow feels wholly fresh, because Knight and co. take its story and characters so deeply seriously. It strikes the balance between classic and novel, traditional and innovative. Wildwood may be indebted to so many great films and epics before it, but there’s truly nothing like it.
