Wildwood is one of the year’s most amazing splendors. A seamless mix of stop-motion animation and CGI, it doesn’t have a single frame that isn’t some sort of movie miracle.
The story it tells is very good—but not quite good enough to call this a complete masterpiece. It’s a solid movie, and a sure contender for the year’s best animated film.
Wildwood is based on the novel by Colin Meloy and owes a bit to Labyrinth (written by Jim Henson and Terry Jones). An infant is kidnapped and whisked off to a magical world in an enchanted hidden forest near Portland, Ore. His sister (the voice of Peyton Elizabeth Lee) goes after him and finds herself up against coyotes in military uniforms (one prominently voiced by Tom Waits) and an evil queen (Carey Mulligan).
The movie is surprisingly dark and violent for an animated movie marketed for kids, so don’t bring your 4-year-olds. That’s not a condemnation in any way; I am just letting you know this is more of an adult adventure than a Sunday matinee for the little ones.
This comes to us from LAIKA Studios, who also brought us the great Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012) and The Boxtrolls (2014). They’ve perfected their visual style to the point where it is hard to distinguish where the practical effects end and the CGI begins. Much of what we see in the characters is stop-motion, while the backgrounds and some major action scenes rely upon CGI. The blend of visual artistry is animated moviemaking at its most ambitious.
The movie cost a lot of money (in the neighborhood of $100 million) but basically bombed at the box office this past weekend. In fact, LAIKA has been experiencing diminishing returns on all of their films since Coraline. That’s a shame, and a testament to the risks of making huge artistic achievements that are animated and perhaps too sophisticated for younger audiences.
I’m curious to see how much longer LAIKA can keep making high art at this level while hemorrhaging money. They are the New York Mets of animated movies.
