The Most Ambitious Stop-Motion Movie of All Time Is Here, and It’s Tremendous

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It’s not every animated movie that opens with a scene in which a naked child—framed in such a way as to preserve the character’s modesty and the film’s PG-13 rating, but clearly nude as a jaybird—teeters on the ledge of a high balcony, considering whether to put an end to his loveless life by crashing to the ground below. Nor do most family movies contain a moment in which a preteen boy, a different one this time, must traverse a battlefield littered with decomposing bodies. Parents deciding whether to take their kids to see Wildwood should think carefully about not just their children’s ages but their individual tolerance for violent and upsetting images. But, those deliberations made, families with kids who can handle the shocks, and adult fans of animation as an art form, should absolutely take the journey into Wildwood’s mythic forest. It’s a dazzling exploration of the possibilities of stop-motion technology, as well as a classic coming-of-age fairy tale in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books or Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.

Wildwood is the sixth film from the Portland-based independent animation studio Laika, all of which have thus far been nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, though Wildwood seems as if it could be the first to actually win. Since Coraline in 2009, the studio has tested the limits of the stop-motion medium, creating an 18-foot puppet for 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings—directed, like Wildwood, by Travis Knight—and now releasing the longest stop-motion feature to date. At just 130 minutes, Wildwood doesn’t feel especially long, but that expanded ambition is palpable. Though the story is as simple as a folk tale (a girl loses her baby brother in an enchanted wilderness and must face down a wicked witch of sorts to rescue him), Wildwood’s storytelling is epic in scope, culminating in Lord of the Rings–style battle sequences involving vast armies of animal, human, and magical warriors.

The feat of filming those scenes, and many others, using a technique that involves individually photographing and physically moving miniatures and puppets around a space built to scale, is so mind-boggling to ponder that Wildwood’s technical brilliance sometimes distracted me from its story. But with the help of legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Right Stuff, The Natural), Knight creates a stop-motion world that feels less like a dollhouse for the viewer to play with (see: Wes Anderson’s use of the technique, which for the record I love) than like a new dimension we’ve entered into, in which our relative scale to the figures onscreen suddenly becomes a minor matter, so completely have we entered into their meticulously constructed universe.

Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a young teenager who lives in Portland with her gentle hippie parents (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) and her toddler brother Mac. Left to babysit her brother while her mom and dad take their crunchy wares to a crafting fair, Prue disregards her father’s pleading warning that she under no circumstances take the boy outside, much less near the haunted woodland of the title that lies just outside town. All Prue wants to do is take her brother to play in a nearby playground, but as he climbs up the slide, the screaming toddler is abducted by a murder of crows that carry him off into the sky (another image for which you might want to ask whether your own small child, or you yourself, is ready).

As Prue looks on in horror, her nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who has been tagging after the girl and her brother to her annoyance, suggests they find some adults to help. But with the perhaps-inadvisable pluck of fantasy heroines everywhere, the independent-thinking Prue determines to cross the threshold that (as apparently all of Portland knows?) separates our everyday reality from a mysterious ivy-bound realm where separate laws of nature, and separate long-held enmities, rule. (Wildwood: Keep it weird!)

Early on in their sojourn into the wood, the two young protagonists are separated. Curtis winds up a captive in the sumptuous digs of the beautiful, grief-ravaged Alexandra, a dowager governess (magnificently voiced by Carey Mulligan, who never for a moment camps up her character’s still-raw heartbreak). Alexandra lost her son in a hunting accident years ago and ever since has been trying every method she can to somehow bring him back. Her acquaintance with the dark arts makes this sinister project at least theoretically feasible, and the kidnapping of Prue’s little brother plays a part in her latest plan. The governess disposes of an army of warlike coyotes outfitted in old-fashioned redcoat uniforms, complete with rolling cannons and flaming trebuchets. (The leader of the coyote military is voiced by Tom Waits, who should take an oath to do a voice-over role in at least one animated movie per year, for all our sakes.)

Prue, for her part, has more freedom to explore the expansive new land that they’ve entered, albeit often in situations of serious danger. She encounters a group of itinerant bandits (their chief is voiced by Mahershala Ali) whose land and livelihood have been ruined by the dowager’s reign. The voices of Richard E. Grant, Rob Delaney, Awkwafina, and Angela Bassett also appear in all-too-brief roles as various otherworldly animals; as with all the voice work in Wildwood, these actors are creating real characters, not merely dropping in to lend the film some celebrity name recognition.

Wildwood is based on the 500-page YA novel written by Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter of the Decemberists, and illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis, who has also created cover art for all the band’s albums to date. Its premise is one that’s familiar from more than one children’s classic: Like the teen heroine played by Jennifer Connelly in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or Meg Murry in Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wind in the Door, Prue ventures into a realm of magic and danger on a seemingly hopeless quest to rescue a younger brother. But there are reasons some storytelling templates endure for generations. The big emotional beats in Wildwood—Prue’s dread of telling her parents that she’s lost her brother, Alexandra’s nature-defying refusal to grieve her son, Curtis’ horror at realizing that becoming a great soldier will involve getting blood on his hands—hit just as hard as they would in a less archetypal framework. Wildwood is at heart an action-adventure film, full of chases and narrow escapes and grand-scale mayhem, but what sets it apart from so many other family-film escapades is its willingness to allow for the complexities of human behavior and emotion. A late story thread about Prue’s parents and the responsibility they may bear for some of the family’s current crisis gets dropped a bit soon; I would have liked to know how this revelation of a long-hidden secret affected our heroine’s development. But the fact that the seemingly blameless parents are afforded some of the same moral complexity as the seemingly wicked queen speaks well of the script by Chris Butler (who also wrote Laika’s ParaNorman and Missing Link).

If you’re lucky enough to see Wildwood in the theater (and you would be denying yourself a tremendous experience not to), stay through the credits. A tiny making-of segment midway through documents the process behind producing less than a minute of screen time, showing a time-lapse montage of the placement and re-placement of a Prue figure. As she’s made to walk up her parents’ driveway, a crew of real-life humans takes the time to move each limb, adjust her expressions, take her picture over and over, and eventually edit it all together to end up with the wondrously tactile world we see onscreen. If the miracle of that level of collaboration, care, and craft all coming together into a work of storytelling isn’t enough to convince you of the existence of magic, then maybe you should remain on the other side of the boundary. For anyone else who’s ready to take the risk, cross the foggy bridge that takes you into Wildwood.