When Wildwood was first announced, one of my initial reactions was shock; how did I not know that Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, a band I absolutely love, had written a fantasy novel? Now, after years of work, Laika and director Travis Knight have delivered their stop-motion-animated adaptation, and it’s a triumph, everything I love about Meloy’s music transposed to film. It’s a classically folksy story told with oomph and passion, elevated further by the staggering achievements in animation that fill every frame. Laika have arguably been the premier name in stop-motion animation in Hollywood for the last two decades; Wildwood stops making it arguable – on the animation side of things at least, it is unparalleled.
As adapted by Knight and writer Chris Butler, Wildwood plays out rather like a Narnia novel, if Narnia had reached 19th Century technology and the portal there wasn’t in stuffy old World War 2 England and instead in the modern hipster capital of Portland, Oregon. We follow Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a too-cool-for-school 12 year old in Portland with hippie parents and a babbling baby brother she adores who must venture into forbidden magical woodlands to save her brother when he’s abducted by a murder of crows.
It’s a proper family fantasy set up that, while breaking no new ground on its own, feels fresh now in an era where this sort of magical call to adventure has fallen out of fashion in favour of superheroes, videogame movies, and pessimistic sci-fi. It also helps that the design work is just jaw-dropping. Beyond the barriers of fog and ivy, Prue, followed by her dorky friend and admirer Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), discovers a gorgeous and dangerous ecosystem of deep forests, talking animals that coexist with humans, armies of coyotes outfitted like British imperial redcoats, and an evil witch queen who threatens to shatter this whole world.
This is Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) – it’s she who sent the crows – and she’s one of 2026’s best villains, not entirely unsympathetic in her goals yet irredeemably evil in her methods. Wildwood has real stakes and danger and fully earns its rare-for-mainstream-animation 12a rating – the violence here is in Lord of the Rings or Pirates of the Caribbean territory, far less clean and sanitised than most blockbusters we get in the 2020s. It’s a bold, possibly even risky, choice but it really pays off, the mud, blood, and thuds of war making the already sublimely well-built world that much more tactile.
And by god how well-built it is. Obviously, Laika has always been known for their immaculate hand-crafted detail, but what really sets Wildwood apart is how it manages to keep all the detail while working at a simply staggering scale. Town squares and mansions bustle with busy, chaotic life, chase sequences barrel through vast swathes of wild and urbanised geography, and the final battle sequence is, plainly, one of the most awe-inspiringly impressive achievements I’ve ever seen on screen. The sheer physical *work* that must have been put in is hard to imagine, and the result is an immersive thrill that any other animation studio would be hard-pressed to come close to, let alone emulate.
The story is less wowing than the visuals and the thrillingly propulsive music, and the script is, on the page, a bit unremarkable, but when it’s put into this world, that barely matters. It helps that, even if the dialogue itself is pretty ordinary, it’s delivered by a bevy of instantly likeable characters, from the overwhelmed Prue and Curtis to a majestic bandit king to a rabbit sheriff to coyote soldier-turned-rebel played with perfect lovable patheticness by Charlie Day.
Voice acting is very strong across the board – Lee does great work at selling the exhaustion of Prue being a kid who has been forced to grow up ahead of time, Mulligan is a vicious villain, and a stacked supporting cast (the likes of Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Tom Waits, and more) adds a lot of gravitas. The story might stick to familiar structures, but you’d be hard-pressed to not be moved by the end and the way it’s brought to physical life is, without hyperbole, a new high watermark for stop-motion, generational work from one of America’s most invaluable animation houses.
