Astoundingly beautiful. What animation should be.

When her baby brother is kidnapped before her very eyes, Prue dives into a magical world to get him back.

Wildwood is directed by Travis Knight (Kubo & the Two Strings, Masters of the Universe) and is from Laika animation studios (Coraline, ParaNorman) It stars voice talent from Preyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay (Life of Chuck) Richard E. Grant, Carey Mulligan, and Charlie Day (Super Mario Brothers Movie)
Laika Studios are the current apex of stop-motion animation. They have given us experiences such as Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Among many others. Wildwood will smash all of these achievements out of the water, and it comes at a very auspicious time. The movie is an adaptation of “Wildwood”, written by Colin Meloy.

The story follows Prue, who is left with baby-sitting duties by her parents. The only rule: don’t take Mac (her baby brother) out of the house. Naturally, the rebellious Prue (Preyton Elizabeth Lee) does exactly that. When a murder of crows steals Mac away, Prue and a boy named Curtis (Tremblay) are on the rescue. But the chase leads to the woods beyond their town… supposedly impassable. Yet this time the magical forest opens for them. What lies beyond is of magic, mysticism, and war.

The adoration for Wildwood is taking over the Internet, and it is easy to see why. The film has been in development for fifteen years, and in active production for seven. It is the most expensive stop-motion animation and also the longest, at an estimated budget of $100million and a total runtime of two hours. For many, Laika Studios is like Japan’s Studio Ghibli; an art house that creates extremely unique and stylistic animations. They take tremendous pains to make their movies entirely with in-camera stop-motion. That is to say, every single frame is a still image, and everything is hand-animated.

Sure, there’s probably computer processing on the images later, but the majority of content on screen is hand-animated. It is important to stress this point again because… what Laika has achieved here is absolutely mind-boggling.

I’ve done my small share of stop-motion animation, and I’ve watched a lot of Laika movies. Or movies like the UK’s Wallace and Gromit. What we have here is a film. What we have is an animated film that you constantly need to remind yourself is stop-motion and not CGI. It is two hours long! That’s absurd! The last time I was this engaged in a movie’s artistry was 2017’s Loving Vincent. A movie where every frame is a literal oil painting (yes, 65,000 oil paintings were painted)
But with stop-motion you expect small scale. Laika has pushed the limits above and beyond here. This is an epic movie, of similar scale to any other fantasy epic.

Story-wise (if we can escape endlessly gushing about its looks and craftsmanship) Wildwood was a bit unsteady at first. But in a reverse of Forgotten Island‘s pacing, Wildwood‘s quality blasts into the stratosphere when our characters enter the fantasy world. There are fun characters and creatures, who have expressive, wonderful animation. There’s huge… huge vistas and landscapes, towns and mansions. Creepy caverns, lush forests, dizzying sky chases. Slap-stick comedy action sequences. Emotional drama and gravitas.

Yes, unlike Forgotten Island recently, you bet I cried. You probably thought I was incapable, considering my recent reviews.

I am treading lightly on spoilers, because this movie kept me guessing. There is an intriguing pre-title sequence that was extremely dark and was a great opening for mystery. The plot flip-flops around nicely, teasing with tropes but always to its benefit. There’s a lot of room for sentimentality and seeing from different perspectives. This isn’t black-and-white storytelling.

One thing Laika Studios is renown for, is making quite adult animation. That is to say… the opposite of Illumination, for example. They never really escaped this since Coraline in 2009. Missing Link was perhaps their lightest movie and it was worse for it. I’m saying Wildwood is dark. It has a 12A rating in the UK for a reason. Very small children probably won’t enjoy this; it isn’t visually bright, it has upsetting themes and morally grey characters. Older children, over 10, will probably get something from this. I certainly hope they do.

The film arrives at an auspicious time, too. Director Travis Knight has been vocal against AI-generated creativity. Justly so; Wildwood is the antithesis of the generative AI art fad. It is creativity made from hardship, toil, and determination. A singular vision brought together by the perfect harmony of hundreds of creative people. If anything, this movie proves exactly why these crafts are so important, and it does so with passion, love, and conviction.

Additional Marshmallows: Even the credits are hand-drawn animation. Stop I can’t take any more wholesome creativity!