‘Wildwood’: A Breathtaking Reminder of the Irreplaceable Value of Humans in the Creative Process   

By Jackson TOYON

“Enjoy handmade art before it’s gone!” 

This beseeching message appears to the audience on a small piece of store signage in the background of a momentary shot near the beginning of the film. However fleeting, it’s a fitting and poignant message – both because of LAIKA Studios’ talent for incredible hand-animated pictures and because of the current state of the entertainment industry where visual arts professions are under a growing threat of being undermined and even replaced by AI. LAIKA, with its near unassailable record, is perhaps one of the greatest examples of an animation studio that understands the importance of an artist’s hand during the production of a film – and it aimed to prove it with its newest venture.

13-year-old Portland resident Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) has never been a believer in magic and thinks she has everything figured out. One day when she ignores her parents’ warnings to not take her baby brother Mac outside of the house, a murder of crows swoops down and spirits him away into the unknown. With the help of her dorky tagalong Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) she ventures on a mission to rescue her beloved little brother and goes into the mysterious but picturesque “Impassable Wilderness” about which her parents always warned her. Before she can catch a breath, Prue’s beliefs are quickly challenged as she and Curtis are chased by talking anthropomorphic coyotes, encounter signs of real magic and meet Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) – the sinister Dowager Governess who harbors hidden motives of her own. Prue and Curtis are split up shortly after their arrival and find themselves in the middle of a coming war that Alexandra is preparing to wage on the land’s ancestral inhabitants – and whoever else dares to oppose her. The life of young Mac and the fate of the Impassable Wilderness hang in the balance and Prue must find strength and belief that she never thought she possessed.

It is difficult to overstate just how staggering are the art and visuals of this film. LAIKA and its dedicated team have achieved the spectacular – having woven a gorgeous, textured, lived-in world with room for both epic scenes of large-scale action and smaller vignettes of more intimate feeling. It has employed stop motion animation (as it always has) but it’s so buttery smooth that it almost doesn’t look like it – qualities that I believe will make it enduring and genre-defining among its peers. It feels like the kind of animated movie that could define childhoods in the same way that Coraline did for so many. Being made by a studio based in Oregon, the film also oozes a tangible love for Portland and the Pacific Northwest that can be felt in the delightful details.

Another way that “Wildwood” particularly stood out to me is how it takes a turn for the mature. Coming in at a little over two hours, it forgoes the industry standard 90-minute runtime and stands alone as LAIKA’s longest and only PG-13 rated film thus far. It’s the furthest thing from a “gorefest” but the extra grim edge it carries as a result is impactful and I believe it will endure better in the public consciousness for it. The film is also carried along by a strong voice cast with much of my praise earned by Carey Mulligan for her portrayal of the evil Dowager Governess. The only element of note that I found the film suffering from was a few moments of fairly generic dialogue but the story well makes up for it and it was never enough to take one out of the experience.

“Wildwood” is a brilliant testament to the medium of animation, the degree of love put into LAIKA’s projects and why filmmaking still matters. The run-of-the-mill Marvel movie might clean up at the box office and hold enough turn-your-brain-off fun to please general audiences at a base level, but its visual feasts and masterful pieces of handmade craft (like this one) inspire future generations to carry on the tradition of creating and sharing art of their own with others. AI can generate homogenized amalgamations of existing material but the best and most important stories will always come from the practiced hands of artists working together to make something bigger than themselves.

Rated PG-13.