Wildwood (Laika/ Fathom)
Originally posted 10/22/1026
“I don’t even believe in magic.”
“And yet here you are, talking to an owl in a waistcoat.”
The enchantment inherent in filmmaking is the potent potion brewed when a viewer suspends their disbelief. The audience knows that everything they see on screen is artifice and illusion. Sometimes when you're watching a movie, you literally can’t believe your eyes. There is a reason for that. The “moving image” is a lie. It is a phantasm. Sophistry. The image doesn’t move; it gets replaced, frame by frame; the eye and the brain fill in the blanks. There is a long and glorious tradition of directors and dreamers fashioning fantastic miracles out of film stock and causing audiences’ jaws to drop.
Wildwood is a phenomenal cinematic experience. It is a monumental visual achievement and a tremendous work of art. The enchantment and artistry are so potent and engrossing that every few seconds, this reviewer had to remind himself what he was watching: there are no MoCap actors, no Stagecraft Volume video walls, no greenscreens; everything the eye can see on screen are highly detailed, inner-frame articulated puppets with 3D-printed expressive parts interacting inside or atop gorgeous, hand-hewn and hand-painted sets. The glamour is complemented by fluid camera angles, immaculate production design, and seamless stop-motion. The movie’s magnificence is magnified by protagonists that are well-written, deep characters who are given room to grow. Wildwood presents compelling and charming individuals who are pushing an engaging story full of familiar elements in a novel and unconventional direction.
Echoes of Jim Henson’s 1986 cult classic Labyrinth buttress the narrative along with a brief homage to Terry Gilliam’s 1985 paean to bureaucratic nightmares, Brazil as well as an odd nod to 1999’s The Matrix and Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus that manages to seamlessly fit. Those pieces are coupled with giant golden eagle generals, ice witches, fearsome woodsmen, helmeted battle bears, brutish bandits, bunny sheriffs, sagacious rats, counterfeit clockwork princes, murders of crows acting as agents of darkness, mystical women mages, town elders, a towering, lush world-tree, even a dapper coyote army armed with cannons. Wildwood surprises by taking commonplace and almost tired tropey references and by turns of phrase and curls of plot, makes them fresh as a sunrise.
“There is magic in the world. There is magic in you!”
Wildwood is a 2026 Laika Studios picture distributed by Fathom Entertainment. Wildwood is based on a 2011 book of the same name by author Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis. The film is directed by Travis Knight from a screenplay written by Chris Butler. At 132 minutes, this epic animated movie is the longest stop-motion film to date. Wildwood has a very large ensemble cast including Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Carey Mulligan, Maya Erskine, Richard E. Grant, Tantoo Cardinal, Jake Johnson and Tom Waits.
“That’s the Impassable Wilderness! We can’t pass through!”
It is then. A clockwork prince called Alexi learns that he’s not a real boy, and he can’t face that truth. As his mother Alexandra (Mulligan) pounds on the locked doors of his bed chambers, the synthetic boy climbs over his balcony railing and leaps to his doom. Many stories below, the artificial child shatters on cobblestones with cogs and gears scattering across the rain-slick street. The beloved prince is dead and rage builds in the crowd as the couple comes forth. The master of the manse emerges from the townhouse. Full of despair, he fumbles for a glowing gear from the oil-splattered road. Grabbing the cog in his shaking hand, he glares at his lady. Anger roils the onlookers around them. As the weeping Alexandra cradles the fake child in her arms, the rage surrounding her brews the crowd into a mob, and the incensed mob surges forward. They descend upon the mistress of the manor with mayhem in their eyes.
It is now. Prue (Elizabeth Lee) is a precocious and spunky teen struggling against her jam-band hippie parents’ somnolent lifestyles in Portland, Oregon. Her Mom and Dad let her explore, bike, learn, and stretch at her own (accelerated) pace in the verdant, cozy neighborhood they live in. It’s strange, though; they won’t let her baby brother Mac out of the house.
Finally, though, they decide she’s due for some responsibility. They’re going to a craft fair. Prue gets to be in charge. She can do whatever she wants, but they insist she must keep Mac indoors. She agrees. She swears.
She lies. Moments after they’re gone, she bundles up the boy, bolts a Radio Flyer to the back of her bike and decides to take the kid on the adventure of a lifetime. She takes him around town. Shows Mac her haunts. Gets the boy a delicious hot chocolate and just as she starts to enjoy her afternoon, she runs into her classmate, Curtis (Tremblay). Curtis isn’t her favorite. They segue into a playground, and Mac crawls on the slide.
Curtis is an introvert’s introvert. He likes Luddite pencil-and-paper RPG’s like Dungeons & Dragons, and he likes Prue. They used to draw together, but she’s gone on to study ornithological illustrations while he is still sketching Beholders.
Suddenly, the playground is surrounded by scores of crows. Curtis reminds Prue that a massing of crows is called a murder. The crows begin to caw, cackling and calling out to one another, all staring at Mac. Then they swarm the slide, grabbing Mac and carrying him into the wind.
Prue is astonished, but she quickly girds her wits and grabs her bike. She takes off after the flock of black birds, getting half a block before she realizes that Curtis is in the Flyer and along for the ride. The birds race for the trestle bridge and head into the mist-covered woods on the other side.
Despite Curtis’ squealed complaints, Prue is implacable. Even when he alerts her to the train on their six, she pedals on. Prue barely makes the turn before they’re run down. She propels them down half-remembered, overgrown paths, chasing glimpses of crows overhead. They’re just in time to watch the baby-snatching birds soar over the imposingly thick forest flora barring their way. As the mist rolls in, a frightened Curtis expresses his concerns. They are at the edge of the Impassible Wilderness. His parents told him never to go into the Impassible Wilderness. It’s Impassible!
Will the pair attempt to defy the Impassible Wilderness? Can Prue really rely on Curtis? Is the terrified Curtis completely out of his depth? Will Prue ever see Mac again, and if not, what the hell will she tell her parents? How long will they be at that art fair anyway? What is up with Alexandra, and is the death of her clockwork child connected to Mac’s abduction? Please see Wildwood to find out.
“This isn’t a game; you can’t roll a dice to make things happen.”
“It’s die. A single dice is a die.”
In 1896, August and Louis Lumière’s 50-second, black-and-white silent short, L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat startles audiences unaware that a camera can capture speed, mass, and movement in the real world and then reproduce it with the cinématographe projecting a steam train as it lumbers through their darkened coffee houses and salons.
Just a short time later, in September of 1902, Georges Méliès made the impossible possible with his film Le Voyage dans la Lune. Méliès travels to the moon using the force of his will, paint, lumber and his imagination coupled with physics. Méliès shot himself to the moon with a faux Grand Cannon twelve years before the Germans’ Krupp-built 42 cm Big Bertha guns will lay siege to Liège in August of 1914. With the novel visual potency of his lunar expedition, Méliès forces the crowd to see things that just do not exist but are also plainly there right before their eyes. Georges weaves the thread of his own ideation into the fabric of reality, turning film into the architecture of dreams.
In May of 1977. “A long time ago”, in a world devoid of CG, there are no credits on screen as a film opens in the dark empty of unfamiliar space, not our own. The world beneath is a swirling, sickly-yellow, sand-blasted desert planet. As thunderous music reaches a crescendo, its engine array straining, a plucky ship races into frame like a cigarette boat fleeing a cutter. Returning fire, the ship is hammered by relentless blasts coming from behind. Moments later, bristling with blazing turrets, a huge grey wedge enters the frame. Sending bolt after bolt into the fleeing cruiser, the wedge keeps growing, with more detail in view; domes, bays, more and more; it keeps coming, bigger and bigger still, larger than one can fathom. The armored grey hull plating finally, finally gives way to aft with three immense and vectored verniers, each glowing engine exhaust pushing the mammoth machine through the night many times larger than the prey the colossal ship is running down.
In May of 1977, no audience has ever seen ANYTHING like this. The viewer’s mind rebels at the vastness of the vessel, the relentless scale, what the enormity of that profoundly powerful ship implies for the plot, as it is but one in a fleet, not to mention the relative helplessness of the men trying to make their escape in their battered blockade runner. With the crew laid low, droids have to escape with the plans (What plans? What’s a ‘droid’?).
Then, it dawns on an astute viewer that someone made that. All of it. Everything the audience sees on screen was made with a craftsman’s hands. The cruiser, the battleship, the interiors, props, costumes, droids- all built from designs laid down on paper someone else dreamed up, followed by another super-talent figuring out how to capture that unique vision on film.
Wildwood is full of scenes like that. The entirety of Wildwood is like that. All of it, the whole film is an experience like that. Every overstuffed moment of this mind-blowing, extraordinary movie, each frame of this lush and gorgeous film, is hand-made by teams of world-class artists working on a real set under actual lights, weaving magic in infinitely small movements that they photograph incrementally. It takes hours, sometimes entire days, to print the twenty-four shots they need for each second of this two-hour-plus film.
This movie is full of many good literary references and genre nods. It also takes hints from actual history. Like "good" Nazis fleeing from the Eastern Front, there is a scene where the coyotes discard their uniforms, weapons, and kit as they retreat in disarray. The very same stubbornness and independence that makes Prue so difficult for her parents to deal with also impedes the best efforts by the various factions of the Wildwood to manipulate her. Obdurate and unrelenting, sick to her stomach with betrayal and battle, Prue wants nothing to do with the Dowager Governess or her fairy tale. She just wants her brother back.
Not only is Wildwood a bountiful visual banquet, but it’s also an emotional roller-coaster perfectly exemplified by Angela Bassett’s golden eagle general’s gasp-generating rescue of Prue and the consequences thereof.
In this digital era of CG, of zeroes and ones as the building blocks of infinite, ethereal spectacles inflating scores of forgettable summer blockbusters all around us, Laika reintroduces weight, shadow and gravity. There is a tactile sense of awe in Wildwood’s Impassable Wilderness and an anachronistic feeling that hearkens back to a pre-CG era of practical, tangible effects, when everything on screen was shot ‘in camera’.
The modern film audience is blasé and sophisticated. They’ve known that anything can be rendered, simulated, composited, exploded or conjured in a movie since 1993, when Laura Dern’s Elle forced Sam Neil’s Dr. Grant to stare at the lumbering, brown apatosaurus herd noshing on treetops while framed against the cloudy blue sky in the Spielberg blockbuster, Jurassic Park.
This fantastic film forces the viewer to remember the emotional power of stories, to respect the sincerity of craft and to once again, hopefully, believe in the value of wonder. In our jaded, modern age, one might think it was buried, but wonder isn’t dead. As we are overwhelmed by the tsunami of AI crap and CG generating once outrageous and incredible images mundane and commonplace, wonder is hiding. It’s chilling out just beyond the Impassible Wilderness. Wonder thrives in the Wildwood. Please go see it. You do NOT want to miss this film.
Wildwood is in theatres 10/23/2026
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