Wildwood is a labour of love, which will see viewers of all ages spellbound, if they catch it in cinemas – and is the latest example of how Laika’s pioneering stop motion can provide a much-needed respite from Hollywood’s increasingly standardised animation. Looking ahead, though, the studio should be wary of prioritising looks, over the narrative invention and edge which established its films a high water mark for animated storytelling.
The craftsmanship at play in Laika movies is genuinely astounding. Every frame is a painting, every scene fussed over lovingly until it bursts with detail, and every character moulded and remoulded until it can be recognised in silhouette from every angle and dimension. But beyond the perfectionism injected into those traditional aspects of stop-motion, the studio has also sought to push forward with innovative bits of technological trickery, that render the scale and smoothness of its movements peerlessly smooth.
You can sit through any one of Laika’s catalogue, and forget you are watching the medium pioneered by the likes of Ray Harryhausen, Will Vinton, Phil Tippett and Nick Park. That’s something to be praised, in a certain context. But I do think that the loss of stop-motion’s rough edges takes away a little of the medium’s earlier magic – the janky charm, and the unmatchable energy and authenticity that it delivers, when telling strange and fresh stories.
That echoes the way I feel about Laika’s latest outing, in contrast to its own catalogue, too.
Wildwood is stunning in so many ways – and for $100 million, it is easy to snark that it should be – and to be swept up in the world it painstakingly renders is an absolute pleasure. At the same time, it has been enjoyable to see the studio receive its proverbial flowers from critics and the audiences who have actually seen it (98% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, if you’re into that sort of thing – and 97% from viewers) – even if box office success remains elusive. But for me, that smoothness has gone a little too far. For all its grandeur, Wildwood is possibly Laika’s most by-the-numbers effort, in terms of character design and storytelling. It’s a safe bet, and as a result, has alienated fewer critics than Coraline did – but when we look back in another decade, will it have the same following? I have my doubts.
Smoothed out
Adapted from Colin Meloy’s book of the same name (his band, The Decembrists, provide a beautiful track for the closing credits), it is a well-told, astutely crafted version of a tale you already know – to the extent it seems to catch itself mid-cliché at certain points, and almost apologetically poke fun at the tropes it is chewing through.
Most notably, when protagonist Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) confronts antagonist Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) as we approach the close of the second act, she cuts her nemesis off in the middle of her sympathetic villain speech, to say she knows how this goes and hastening to add, “I don’t buy it”. Nonetheless, while it takes a different conversational route to get there, she ends up back on that same familiar narrative track.
To be fair, that is a nice play (if you really believe they meant it) on the fact that, even when we know the tropes, we can still be total suckers for them, when they are delivered this well. For example, Wildwood being a take on a fantasy epic, we know there will be a climactic battle. And when we arrive in it, we know the movie is going to break our hearts by killing off at least one of the cutest characters we’ve been introduced to. But knowing that doesn’t stop me welling up at the thought of it a week after the end credits rolled.
All of this is to say that Wildwood is great. The two hours fly by, and you should see it. But…
Considering this is the film which took 16 years to make, the one which director and producer Travis Knight decided to bet the house on, (and how ever rich his father might be, there’s only so many of those gambles I suspect he will still get to make), this is Laika’s most conventional effort. And while the first five of its films could surprise, and even scare us, the idea those were all a learning process for the sake of making smoothed out characters move steadily through a smoothed out plot, is a little sad. Especially when this is the film which will be held up as an example of what human imagination can create verses the plagiaristic slop of AI.
There is plenty of blood, plenty of stabbings, Wildwood has a darkness to it. But less of the humour, invention or bite of Coraline, ParaNorman, or Missing Link. In stories we already know the bones of, it is harder to feel that sense of risk, or of being in unchartered territory, which is at the heart of the best of Laika, animation, and human creation as a whole.
Rough it up
Looking at those earlier flourishes, each came in the middle of three decades where studios have resigned themselves to just bunging something out in increasingly monocultural CGI, as the quickest way to offer up bare-minimum entertainment for kids – learning all the wrong lessons from the success of Toy Story and Shrek. Smooth motions, ‘realistic’ visuals, that must be what kids want these days…
In that environment, a process of grotesque carcinisation saw characters in every poster contort into some variation of the DreamWorks smirk – while Disney cannibalised and bastardised their own back-catalogue, symbolically spitting on any form of creation their young fans might have engaged with at home. That drawing of Simba is cute and all, but only photo-real nightmare visuals get on Mickey Mouse’s fridge these days.
Laika has been – and still can be – a wonderful alternative to that. It shows that you can make something which rivals the visual polish of modern CGI, but with a weight and texture that they cannot approximate – and imbue it with wonderful flourishes of style and characterisation, while telling a story that veers away from the standard A-to-B routes. (And, I would say, just as importantly, it’s an accessible form of art which a toddler with some Play-doh can take inspiration from at home.) Wildwood seems like Laika leant too heavily on the visual part of that equation this time. Its storytellers just need to remember that its brilliance doesn’t come from that smoothness – the rough edges are what really counts.
