Stop Motion has NEVER looked this good in Wildwood – A Review

The Review contains no spoilers.

Good God, this was beautiful.

There is a glorious extravagance to building a world this detailed and then giving it inhabitants capable of competing with it for your attention. Wildwood’s sets are gorgeous, intricate enough to reward looking beyond whoever happens to be speaking, yet the characters are so expressive, their movements so fluid and their faces so full of personality, that there is always a reason to look back. LAIKA has done it again.

The fluidity is remarkable. Now and then, a particular movement does make the hand animation more apparent, or the light catches that slight sheen on a character’s face, familiar qualities of stop motion becoming noticeable within performances that otherwise move with extraordinary ease. But that is part of the charm. The characters look tangible. Their expressions are vivid, their bodies carry personality, and the animation makes them entertaining to watch even when there is already an enormous amount happening around them.

It is the thought and effort required to sustain that which leaves me gobsmacked. An expression has to be chosen, a movement worked through, a performance assembled through decisions that then have to be sustained through another shot, another scene, another character doing something completely different. Each has to behave convincingly enough that we can follow the film while those decisions pass before us as apparently natural movement. Wildwood makes that look easy, and knowing the process only makes the scale of what LAIKA has undertaken more impressive.

And then somebody has to build the forest.

Production designer Nelson Lowry describes making ivy leaves continuously for four years, laser-cut but applied by hand. Four years of foliage. It is an almost absurd amount of work to contemplate, particularly when so much of it will be registered simply as the surroundings while a character speaks or moves through the scene. Yet that detail is part of why the forest looks so convincing. The film can carry on with its adventure because people have spent years making the place in which it happens.

The set design is impeccable. There is a richness to these environments that makes them worth examining beyond their immediate use in a scene, and I love the ambition of giving a fantasy world that much attention, of making it beautiful at the level of things the audience might not even notice because the story is taking them somewhere else. The care is there all the same. It contributes to the impression of a complete place, and it gives the characters surroundings worthy of the work that has gone into them.

That is what makes the visual achievement so satisfying. The detail supports the whole image rather than demanding that we stop to admire each part separately. We can watch a performance, follow the action, look further into the setting, and the film has something worth seeing wherever our attention lands. There is an extraordinary amount of generosity in that, and Wildwood keeps it going across an entire adventure.

Stop motion has never, never looked this good.

Sorry, Aardman. I still think you are the better studio, but LAIKA gets this one.

I went in knowing that a girl’s brother gets kidnapped. That was about it, and I would happily leave somebody else with the same starting point. The opening is heartbreaking, the film is very funny, and some of the themes are heavier than I had expected. Travis Knight’s adaptation gave me plenty to discover, and plenty to feel, without needing any more preparation than that.

Narnia and The Lord of The Rings came to mind quite often. There are narrative parallels with both, and Tolkien is such a large part of why I love fantasy that finding those connections was a particular pleasure. I loved the familiarity of certain turns in the adventure, the recognition of stories I care about within a film that was giving me so much of its own to enjoy. Wildwood felt naturally welcome in that company.

However, there were moments I wanted Wildwood to be less playful. The kidnapping is threatening, but the humour softens a scene that could have been considerably scarier, and there were moments when I felt the film holding itself back for its intended audience. Some of its darker material deserved to be allowed to go further. There is also some over-exposition, and a few passages of voicework sound too obviously studio-recorded to blend convincingly into their surroundings, briefly disturbing the otherwise remarkable verisimilitude.

And then LAIKA sends us to war. Hundreds of characters move independently across the battlefield, their actions intersecting and affecting one another, with hand animation and CG combined so seamlessly that the coordination alone is a marvel. I was already won over by the care given to a face, a gesture, a patch of forest. Apparently, that was LAIKA being restrained. Having spent so long inviting us to appreciate the smallest details, Wildwood suddenly unleashes everything at once, this meticulous film showing just how much havoc it can orchestrate, filling the screen with so much movement and invention that there is an almost indecent confidence to the whole undertaking. You can practically hear the studio laughing at the thought that we might have seen its best work already. Years of painstaking work, frame after painstaking frame, put towards the glorious business of blowing us away.

What a magnificent act of showing off.

After that, the production footage at the end is thoroughly earned. We have watched the finished sequences flow past us; now we get a glimpse of the incomprehensible work required to make them, the preparation and repeated adjustments behind movements that take seconds on screen. Even the number of production babies in the credits gives some indication of the years involved.

An enormous amount of time has gone into making something this achingly brilliant, and we get the pleasure of spending an evening with it.

Wildwood is damn near perfect.