Wildwood review: Laika builds a forest by hand, then fills it with borrowed parts

Wildwood is the most impressive thing Laika has ever built, and the least surprising story it has ever told. Travis Knight's stop-motion fantasy is a forest made by hand, frame by frame, at a scale that should not be possible. Then it fills that forest with parts from Narnia, The Lord of the Rings and Labyrinth. Go anyway. Go for the craft, bring a kid who can handle a PG-13, and forgive the plot for being a little ordinary.

A sister, a stolen baby and a forest nobody enters#

Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a Portland kid who has outgrown her parents' hippie charm. They are voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine. They tell her to watch her baby brother, Mac, and not to leave the house. She takes him downtown on her bike anyway. A murder of crows swoops down and carries Mac off into the "Impassable Wilderness" across the river.

Prue gives chase. So does Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), a classmate who likes fantasy games and likes Prue more. Inside the woods they find a whole hidden country of talking animals, scheming officials and a grief-struck Dowager Governess (Carey Mulligan) with an army of coyotes in red coats.

That is the set-up, and it is told with real menace. The crow attack alone is a lovely bit of Hitchcock, as the Guardian and Rolling Stone both note.

The handmade numbers are absurd#

Laika makes films the slow way, and this is its biggest. IndieWire's David Ehrlich reports that the studio 3D-printed 142,000 face models, hand-made 728 trees and used more than 715 miles of brass wire over 1,155 days of production. The crew also built a miniature Powell's City of Books for its version of Portland.

You can see the work on screen. Prue's face, as Vulture's Alison Willmore puts it, is both childlike and wizened, free of the standard big-eyed cuteness of studio animation. Rolling Stone's David Fear points to shots that look like a Bosch painting and a plant-based showstopper that will make adults mutter "whoa."

There is a catch, and Ehrlich names it. Laika worked with Wētā FX, and 670 of the film's 2,804 shots were touched up with CGI. Much of it blends in. But the biggest scenes, the armies and walls of ivy, look like more than human hands could do. That is the point of the effects, and also the problem with them. Stop-motion's charm is that you can feel the fingers.

The story is built from borrowed parts#

The screenplay is by Laika regular Chris Butler, from Colin Meloy's 2011 novel with Carson Ellis's illustrations. Willmore says many of its pieces are so obviously borrowed from other sources that it is hard to latch onto any of them. Mulligan's governess is a White Witch type. A weak governor has a sly adviser who could be Wormtongue's cousin. Fear jokes that you half expect a lion or a wardrobe to turn up.

Ehrlich is harsher. He calls Wildwood the least enchanting of Laika's films and says all the printed faces cannot stop the characters from feeling flat. Curtis gets the worst of it. He has a lot of screen time and not much reason to be there.

The supporting voices are strong but thinly used. Ehrlich enjoyed Richard E. Grant's theatrical owl and was then disappointed by how little he does. Mahershala Ali plays a bandit leader named Brendan. Tom Waits growls as a coyote officer. Awkwafina plays a hungry rat. Everyone is good. Few of them get a scene that is theirs.

It is dark, and the rating means it#

This is rated PG-13, and RT lists the reasons, including strong fantasy violence, bloody images and suicide-related material. Ehrlich warns that the rating is there for a reason from the first scene. Willmore says it is only for younger kids if they are ready for some psychological scarring. Laika has never been shy about frightening children. It is part of the brand.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw is the warmest of the bunch. He calls it "a forthright, exuberant, good-natured and old-fashioned children's tale" that C.S. Lewis and Tolkien would have recognized. He did wish the governess had a clearer motive. So did we.

What critics and audiences say#

Most critics are far kinder than the complaints above suggest. Wildwood has 98 percent from 177 reviews and a 97 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It opened third with about $12.3 million and had reached about $40.1 million in the U.S. and Canada by November 8, per Box Office Mojo.

Basics are from Rotten Tomatoes and IndieWire.

The verdict#

Wildwood is a hand-carved cathedral with a paperback inside. The paperback is fine. The cathedral is the reason to go. Stay through the credits, too: Laika usually shows the animators at work, and Willmore admits that moment brings her to tears every time.

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