Film Review: Of War, Whimsy, and ‘Wildwood’

I did it too. Flipping through a crisp hardcover copy of Colin Meloy’s Wildwood in 2011, I fell for Carson Ellis’ wondrous illustrations, and I bought that book for a five-year-old. The boy’s mother gracefully took it from me and put it on a shelf for a few years.

With Laika’s adaptation of the novel about to hit movie theaters on October 23, it seems inevitable that others will also misunderstand Wildwood as a kids’ story, even if it does carry a PG-13 rating. Buzz building around the beloved Portland-placed fantasy—made by a Portland-suburb stop-motion animation studio—has been unabashedly whimsical and glowing. And it’s deserved. Wildwood is gorgeous in ways that need new definition. It also opens with a young person throwing himself off a roof to his death.

It can be both things. And it’s difficult to overstate the beauty director Travis Knight and those at Laika Studios have created. The forest is especially magical: foggy on the outside, sunny on the inside, with every leaf seeming to rustle in the breeze. As a precocious Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) exultantly rides a giant golden eagle (voiced by Angela Bassett) on her quest to find her kidnapped younger brother, every feather on the General ripples realistically. If you look for it, you can see the eagle’s chest rise and fall with breath, so it’s especially upsetting when it stops.

Fans of content-warning site Does the Dog Die will want to know that, if you consider coyotes dogs, many dogs die. The coyotes also yelp with pain when hurt, and they’re considered villains, so they’re hurt often. The similarly maligned crows show a propensity to explode—to the point that people in our theater coined the term “crowsplosions.”

Working up to killing a coyote—or following through with violence of any kind—turns out to be a major plot point for Prue’s friend Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) because murder is a traditional manhood rite. We should all expect this from a story by the frontman of the Decemberists, however. Meloy has always presented himself as a writer of swashbuckling stories of wanton cruelty.

Because the movie’s characters are young, it’s tempting to see this as a kids’ story and therefore a moral tale, but it might just be a story. And since it’s Meloy’s story, there are crowsplosions.

Wildwood presents a truly grand amount of material to nitpick: Why does a stop-motion-animated 12-year-old somehow still look like she’s being played by a 30-year-old actress? Are her parents just letting their kids fight for their lives in the forest while they stay home? Does the Dowager Governess (Carey Mulligan) remind anyone else of local author Lidia Yuknavitch? Sometimes good nitpicking just means we’re interested, and Wildwood will keep your attention glued for its entire 131-minute runtime.

It took Knight 16 years to adapt Wildwood, and in the end, Laika has transcended what a stop-motion animation film can be and proven the form once more—both on the battlefield of sheer beauty and also concerning emotion. It’s obvious that the animal deaths were so impactful because 3D puppets that breathe and flutter feel more like real animals, so violence done to them hits harder.

Most people have a story of the first upsetting movie they saw. Maybe they felt too young for it or maybe the death of Bambi’s mother transcends age. Wildwood isn’t for five-year-olds, but if it shocks your babe, you’ll just have to talk it out and answer the questions. Are coyotes dogs, and how did Lidia Yuknavitch come to control so many? 

A movie as inventive and well-executed as Wildwood is a real gift to Portland and to anyone who loves to imagine bandit battles. There’s been a ton of hype, and you can believe it.

Wildwood opens in wide release Fri Oct 23, 131 minutes, rated PG-13.

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, you can reach Washington’s suicide hotline by dialing 988.

This review was originally published by our sister paper, Portland Mercury.

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