My Cultural Diet

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, shall we? In terms of visuals and animation, Wildwood is just one solid flex after another, and each flex is made all the more impressive because, this being a stop-motion film, they’re literally hand-made. There were multiple times when it struck me that LAIKA’s animators purposefully decided to make their scenes as intricate and detailed as possible (e.g., the eagle chase, the climactic battle). That certainly made their jobs harder and more time-consuming — in all, Wildwood took five years to produce — but the result is an immersive and entertaining film that also serves as a shot across the bow of every single “AI is the future of filmmaking” announcement that pollutes social media these days. That said, I wish I could say something similar for Wildwood’s story, which was adapted from Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s 2011 novel. It’s not a bad story, per se, and I was never not invested in young Prue McKeel’s efforts to save her baby brother from the clutches of an evil witch. But it also feels pretty derivative at times. (I challenge you, for example, to simply count the number of callbacks and parallels to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) What’s more, certain character moments and revelations, particularly those involving Prue’s hippie parents, actually take away from the film and undermine its ending. As much as I enjoyed Wildwood, I was never quite able to shake the feeling that it could’ve been something even more unique and breathtaking, something was truly worthy of its marvelous visuals.

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