If LAIKA’s Wildwood was an absolute travesty in every other way, its floor would remain high because simply just looking at it, regardless of plot or character, is the overwhelming visual experience of 2026, a year that included Christopher Nolan on location tackling Homer. A small army of over 1,000 made a model world of Portland, Oregon, (where the studio is located) and the titular dark enchanted forest beyond the city come to life with hand-painted and molded sets and characters that had to be moved a fraction of an inch and photographed a frame at a time. As animation migrates almost entirely to computer-generated in America, the studio founded by Nike’s Phil Knight is pushing back with the most ambitious stop motion project in its 21-year history (Wildwood being directed by his son Travis Knight). There were 230 puppets photographed on 132 sets across 2,775 shots that make up an over two-hour film, and all that thought and attention to detail translates to the screen with every textured strand of hair, stitch in a child’s knit beanie, deciduous tree leaf, granule of dirt, and owl feather. So it’s a bonus that the movie, removed entirely from its visual majesty, is also quite good.
Wildwood is based on a coming of age hard fantasy series of books written by The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis. The first installment, which gives this film its center, revolves around a kidnapping. It opens one gray Pacific Northwestern afternoon on a playground, when teenage Prue’s baby brother Mac is stolen away by a murder of crows (a scene rendered astonishingly in the film). Prue is the child of hippies who is eager to grow up, which she expresses through skepticism and SAT words that she only kind of understands. With a Jewish, D&D-loving nerd as her sidekick, Prue has to trek into the heart of the aforementioned wood to confront a witch who needs Prue’s brother in her plan to destroy the forest. In her quest to save her brother, she’ll face great challenges, overcome great odds, meet fantastical creatures, learn something about the world and herself, and, well, etc.
The screenplay, written by Chris Butler (serving as something like the Andrew Stanton of LAIKA, having directed Paranorman and Missing Link and written the studio’s masterpiece, Kubo and the Two Strings), reorganizes parts of the book, starting with what appears to be a macabre child death. It’s a statement of purpose for the film, which does two things very right: it doesn’t sand down any of the sharp edges from its source material, and it doesn’t breadcrumb its dialogue with pop culture references (which is not to say it isn’t funny). In the film, bayonet-wielding coyote soldiers are hit by mail trucks, giant birds are detonated with shotguns or felled out of the sky with arrows, helpless hooded prisoners are killed, and characters are decapitated on screen. However one feels about the general frictionless familiar journey of the story, in its unsparing commitment to darkness viewers will be constantly surprised by how far the film is willing to go, perhaps if they come in numbed by a genre of film that has lost its bite in its eagerness to appeal to every quadrant.
LAIKA and Travis Knight refuse to play the game, limiting their film’s audience in delivering a proper PG-13, old-school animated epic for young adults. There are real life-or-death stakes and big, simple story beats and emotions that don’t pander to children — or grownups. Wildwood is an original story based on a mythology soup, which may turn off some viewers in its predictable Campbellian arc. But it’s been adapted by screenwriters and animators with taste, capable thieves who steal from the right sources with obvious strands of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Brothers Grimm, J.M. Barrie, Michael Ende, and Brian Jacques in its DNA. Jacques particularly comes to mind with regard to the film’s set pieces, which are simply breathtaking — you’d have to go back as far as Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tin Tin (aided by motion capture and CGI) to find any animated film that even comes close to the kinetic thrill you get from battle and chase sequences here. Anthropomorphic animals gouge eyes and break bones, killing each other brutally in a field as the camera swirls around them, and you feel the physical geography of the space because there is physical geography for Knight to film.
Wildwood is also fearless in its treatment of mature themes. The film’s big bad is the Dowager Governess, a sorceress who commands the coyote army and turned to black magic after her child died (voiced in a standout performance by Carey Mulligan). In this way, Knight’s film is frank in its handling of a mother’s grief, rooted in a story about retaining wonder and compassion in the face of harrowing adult reality.
Emerging out of a contemporary family film morass of CGI sequels that equate needle drops with humor, both in its (mostly) analog craft and its ancient, comforting, well-executed storytelling, Wildwood appears destined to join the ranks of Burton and Selick as a timeless Halloween classic — though it remains to be seen if it will be an out-of-the-gate conventional classic, or will find success of the cult variety. LAIKA has bet big, releasing the $100m film independently through the distributor Fathom Entertainment — typically reserved for event and repertory screenings that interrupt regularly scheduled programming at mainstream cineplexes — rather than working with a major studio because they wanted more control over the rollout of the project they’ve spent 15 years developing. We should all be rooting for that bet to hit.
Wilwood ends biblically: on a mountain top, a baby fixed under a dangling blade primed for a blood sacrifice, the world hanging in the balance. You already know it works out. That doesn’t make it any less compelling to watch.
DIRECTOR: Travis Knight; CAST: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett; DISTRIBUTOR: Fathom Entertainment; IN THEATERS: October 23; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 12 min.
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