‘Wildwood’ Review: A Handmade Forest That Dares to Break Your Heart

It has been seven years since Laika last put a stop motion feature in cinemas, and ‘Wildwood’ arrives on October 23 carrying the weight of that wait. Travis Knight directs from a script by Chris Butler, adapting the fantasy novel by Colin Meloy with illustrations by Carson Ellis. At two hours and twelve minutes, it is the studio’s most sprawling outing yet.

The setup is pure storybook. A crow abducts the baby brother of thirteen year old Prue McKeel, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, and carries him over the edge of Portland into a hidden realm called the Impassable Wilderness. Prue drags along a reluctant classmate named Curtis, played by Jacob Tremblay, whose love of role playing games has made him an easy target for her eye rolls.

What struck me first is how little this film is interested in being cute. The opening minutes deliver a tragedy that lands hard, and the story that follows keeps circling grief, with Carey Mulligan’s Alexandra standing as a mother whose loss has curdled into something dangerous. This is the rare family adventure that trusts its audience to sit with sadness.

Then there is the sheer physical achievement of it. Armies of coyotes in red coats march across miniature battlefields, a bandit king played by Mahershala Ali rules a camp full of tiny, tactile detail, and the forest itself feels thick enough to get lost in. I kept catching myself wondering how many hands touched a single frame.

Nothing shows that devotion better than the General, a golden eagle voiced by Angela Bassett. The production team reportedly attached around nine thousand feathers by hand across two puppets, one built for soaring and one for performance, and every ounce of that labor shows when she cuts through the sky. These flying sequences are the most thrilling stretch of stop motion I have seen.

The film is not flawless, and the cracks show in the storytelling. Some of the supporting figures feel assembled from familiar fantasy parts, and the jokes occasionally arrive just as the tension should be building, which softens a few of the more serious beats. At over two hours, the middle also drifts into a rhythm of travel, meet a new faction, repeat.

Even so, the performances carry the emotional load. Lee makes Prue prickly without making her unlikable, and Tremblay gives Curtis a warmth that grows quietly until you realize he has become the heart of the journey. Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine bring a lived in Portland looseness to the McKeel parents, and the local humor about the city’s quirks is affectionate rather than smug.

I walked out of ‘Wildwood’ a little shaken and a lot amazed. It is bolder than most animation dares to be, gorgeous in a way no software shortcut could imitate, and willing to hurt you before it heals you. A familiar plot and a few uneven laughs keep it from perfection, but I am happy to call it one of the finest animated films of the year and give it 9 out of 10.

Did ‘Wildwood’ earn its place as Laika’s greatest adventure for you, or did the darker turn lose you in the woods, and let us know in the comments?