It’s the sets you notice first. Production design isn’t normally the first thing that sticks out. And it will not be your only takeaway from watching Wildwood. But what sets! What vistas! Reportedly over 100 ‘locations’ were built for this film, an enterprise which seems to laugh in the face of the normal limitations placed on stop-motion animation, a technology once dismissed as quite primitive. Yet watching this, you have the curious feeling as if you’re watching a live-action movie — while at the same time, never once forgetting this was all conjured up by hundreds of artists, incrementally moving models by millimetres.
In every sense, this marks a significant step-up for Portland’s Laika, in its sixth film. Not just technically, with animation more naturalistic and realistic, smoother motion and greater integration between practical and CG assists — but also more mature storytelling and a bigger, bolder narrative canvas. Their last film, 2019’s Missing Link, was a likeable but slight comedy about a Sasquatch named Susan. This, the second animated film directed by the company’s CEO Travis Knight, is more in the mould of his last animated effort, Kubo And The Two Strings: a serious if playful adventure about grief and loss.
There is something of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke in its tone.
It is based on the book written by Colin Meloy (lead singer of Portland rock heroes The Decemberists) and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis. For Laika — who snapped up the cinematic rights before publication — it perfectly matches their sensibilities: sensitive and earnest material, teeming with fantasy and magic but just as interested in humanity and pathos.
Like Laika itself, this is a product of, about, and set in Portland, Oregon, and Knight has fun gently playing with the Portlandia-esque stereotypes — look out for the unicycling, fire-breathing Darth Vader — without ever feeling judgmental. It’s more an affectionate love letter, the city beautifully rendered, with laser-printed pink blossom and cobbled streets. It’s in this quirky, independent-minded city that we meet the McKeel family: mum and dad (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are classic Oregon hippies and Burning Man veterans who knit their own beanies; their daughter Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a precocious, wiser-than-her-age teen who refuses to believe in magic, finds her hometown weird, and grumbles about having to babysit her brother Mac. When Mac is kidnapped by a murder of crows, she best start believin’ in fairy tales: she’s in one.
Alongside dorky but good-hearted hanger-on and tabletop RPG enthusiast Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), they begin a rescue mission for her brother into the titular wildwood, the ‘Impassable Wilderness’. When Prue and Curtis enter a mysterious bridge-set portal — one of many Narnia-y touches — the pair find themselves thrust into a world of talking animals, druid mystics and warring factions, the weirdness of the city mirrored tenfold. As well as C.S. Lewis, there are flashes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Guillermo del Toro, the animal bureaucracy of Zootropolis and all-out eccentricity of Labyrinth (sure, why not have coyotes firing muskets?). There is also, in its reverence for and terror at the majesty of the natural world, something of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke in its tone, mysterious and moody and bloody.
Like Hayao Miyazaki’s film, this is a dark piece of work. At one point we see a burnt-out battlefield strewn with the bloodied bodies of dead soldiers. The film even opens with a suicide, of sorts. With the kind of body count normally found in a 1980s Arnie actioner, this is definitely not suitable for very young kids. It’s not just the violence, either. There are meaty themes here about grief and trauma, about family secrets and poisonous ideologies spreading like ivy, about learning to move past differences and join a deadly collective effort for an honourable cause. It is, among other things, a war film, with a jaw-dropping final battle sequence that recalls a Game Of Thrones set-piece or the wushu of Zhang Yimou.
But while it is defiantly high fantasy — characters include an enormous bird named Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant) and a law-enforcement bunny called Constable Samuel (Rob Delaney) — Knight maintains his focus on the character work. It is the nuanced, lovingly studied character animation that marks Wildwood as such a step-up. From the micro to the macro, this is a film which stretches the bounds of what cinematic stop-motion can be. If anything, it’s too good, Laika’s perfectionist tendencies meaning it’s sometimes hard to tell where the hand-generated animation begins and the computer-generated touch-ups step in. That is the effect of a film like Wildwood: like all great animation, it makes you believe in magic.