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“Enjoy handmade art before it’s gone forever.” Keen-eyed viewers may read these words fleetingly on screen in the early stages of “Wildwood,” amid a wealth of fast-passing sights and sight gags as its young heroine
cycles furiously through the homey, bustling streets of Portland, Oregon. Printed on a sign next to the craggly wares of a local ceramicist, the line gently pokes fun at the city’s wholesome, hippy-dippy spirit — but it’s also a sincere advertisement for the predominantly handcrafted virtues of “Wildwood” itself. If the in-joke sounds a little self-congratulatory, director Travis Knight and his team have a right to brag: The sixth feature from independent animation studio Laika is a stunner, a lovingly tactile and thumbprinted feat of stop-motion artistry on a scale rarely seen in the medium, that stands out by a mile in a cartoon marketplace ruled by sheeny, uncanny digital graphics.
That’s not in itself a revelation. Laika’s pleasingly organic, idiosyncratic (and let it be said, subtly CG-augmented) visual style has impressed from their 2009 debut, Henry Selick’s modern children’s classic “Coraline,” through to the likably goofy comedy “Missing Link” a decade later. Both those films opted for a cozily oddball storytelling style that matched the intimacy of their craftsmanship. In 2016’s historical Japanese adventure “Kubo and the Two Strings,” however, Knight pushed this decidedly miniaturist medium into brashly epic territory — an objective he pursues even more ambitiously in this sprawling 130-minute adventure, which narratively runs the gamut from gothic fairytale to visceral fantasy warfare. Some longtime Laika fans may harbor warmer feelings for the studio’s smaller, quirkier outings, but as both a formal achievement and a generation-crossing crowdpleaser, “Wildwood” is a spectacular success.
If the film is, at a story level, somewhat more generic than we’ve come to expect from the Laika playbook, that also goes for the book it’s adapted from. A 500-page-plus doorstop by indie musician Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists fame) that straddles the border between children’s and YA literature, the novel shows no great originality of prose or concept — fragments of works by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Enid Blyton and Kenneth Grahame are all mixed into its narrative and imagery, not to mention a sizable chunk of Jim Henson’s film “Labyrinth” — but it’s an absorbing yarn nonetheless. The same goes for the film, in which the studio’s regular screenwriter Chris Butler perhaps even improves on the source material: The dialogue is sparky, the relationships quick-drawn but genuinely felt.
It opens on a sequence of quite frightening, disorienting strangeness that immediately makes sense of the film’s outwardly surprising PG-13 certificate — presaging a degree of bloodshed and emotional intensity not to be ignored by parents seeking an animated film to babysit their little ones. As a thunderstorm rages outside, a young boy in an imposing woodland castle steps onto a high terrace outside his bedroom, and deliberately plunges to his death before his distraught mother can stop him; as crowds gather at the site of the tragedy, it’s discovered that the boy was merely an android, his chest shattered to reveal the metal cogs within.
It’s some time before we’re given the context for this solemn, cryptically beautiful opening gambit, as we cut to an altogether more recognizable childhood: that of precocious 12-year-old Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), who lives with her bohemian hipster parents (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) and baby brother Mac in a tranquil Portland suburb, and who’s just beginning to wish for a life less ordinary, or at least less oatmealy. Her parents are earnest, overprotective types (Mac is never allowed outside, for reasons initially unknown) who subscribe to much regional lore and superstition, particularly regarding the so-called Impassable Wilderness on the edge of town — a temptingly dense forest that locals are forbidden to enter.
Enter it we shall, of course, but only under dire circumstances — when Prue, skeptically ignoring her parents’ instructions when asked to look after Mac for an afternoon, takes him to a local playground, only to watch helplessly as the infant is lifted up, up and away by a distinctly Hitchcockian (and quite possibly literal) murder of crows. Cue an enthralling chase sequence, doubling back through those higgledy-piggledy Portland streetscapes, toward the woods — the impenetrable thickets and thorns of which magically part in her presence. (Another point of mystery to be bookmarked for later.)
She’s initially joined in her panicked search by well-meaning but hopelessly nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) — who, of course, turns out to be made of sterner stuff than you might think — but they’re soon separated in a dizzyingly diverse and surreal ecosystem in which separate patches of land are variously ruled by Redcoat-styled military coyotes, highly intelligent and supersized birds of prey, and human figures ranging from kindly sorceresses to hulking bandits to petty bureaucrats. Prue soon finds her already daunting search complicated by long-festering tensions between these factions, with the powerfully villainous and violently broken-hearted Dowager Governess (superbly voiced by Carey Mulligan) at the crux of them all. The outsider girl’s innocent invasion may just be the thing that finally triggers a war.
It’s a saga at once complex and classically simple, rife with timeworn fairytale tropes from grieving queens to imperilled babes in the wood, and stuffed with enough peppy secondary characters to justify an all-star voice ensemble. (Mahershala Ali is a gruff but gold-hearted warrior; Awkwafina a snide but helpful rat heavily indebted to E.B. White’s Templeton.) It runs into a lull here and there — the runtime, while swaggeringly impressive, is not altogether necessary — but it’s largely entrancing, not least because each newly revealed nook of these infinite wilds gives a crack team of claymation artists new tones, textures, creatures and mythological reference points to play with.
A majestic, outsize golden eagle (voiced, naturally, with regal authority by Angela Bassett) who comes to Prue’s rescue at one vital point is a thing of immense wonder, its every feather as painstakingly articulated as the swarming ivy leaves strangling certain sectors of the forest; a towering holy tree moves ravishingly through several seasons of foliage in a matter of seconds. But the animators are no less attentive to fine-grained details: the characterful snarling set of each coyote’s jaw, or a tear glistening in close-up on a soft, reddened cheek. It’s all exquisitely lit, moreover, by veteran DP Caleb Deschanel (“The Black Stallion,” “The Passion of the Christ”), whether lending just the right crepuscular glow to an enchanted glade, or manipulating the spindly shadows of the woods at witching hour.
Dario Marianelli’s score is likewise restless and many-hued, alternately taking inspiration from whirling Celtic strings, military-tattoo percussion and jaunty acoustic instrumentation — though an early needle-drop of Loretta Lynn’s country-rock banger “Portland Oregon” is never matched for its unexpected modernity. (Meloy’s band contributes a pleasantly inspirational closing-credits ditty.) “Wildwood” is on the verge of visual and sonic overkill, but abundance is very much the point of a story about exploring and embracing all corners of the world around you, even those you’ve been explicitly told to stay away from. In that spirit, too, Knight’s film borrows much from the library of fantasy and folklore, but with enough of its own exuberance and imagination to feel like a new standard. Perhaps handmade art isn’t going anywhere just yet.
