Wildwood (2026)
“I don’t want any part of your fairytale. I just want my brother.” Prue McKeel says this to a forest that has swallowed her baby brother, and I took the line for a flash of teenage temper. It turned out to be the thesis. Prue is a Portland schoolgirl who has decided she is too old for her father’s stories about the Impassable Wilderness, and Wildwood spends its long running time dismantling that certainty, gently but without sentiment. I went in prepared to admire the puppetry. I came out moved, which I had not planned on.
Crows carry off the baby, Mac, into the woods beyond the city. Prue follows, with a classmate she can’t stand (Jacob Tremblay’s Curtis) trailing behind, and the two cross into Wildwood, a hidden country where talking animals, bandits, and a grieving sorceress share uneasy ground. A crowded place, then. Peyton Elizabeth Lee plays Prue prickly without letting her turn tiresome, which is harder than it looks, and around her Mahershala Ali is a bandit king, Richard E. Grant an owl, Angela Bassett an eagle who carries Prue above the treetops, and Tom Waits a coyote in a soldier’s uniform.
Carey Mulligan’s Dowager Governess is the villain, and I understood her a little too well. She is driven by grief and will not let loss be loss; Prue, in her hurry to grow up, refuses a different kind of ending. Two refusals, one monstrous and one ordinary. Chris Butler’s screenplay lets the ordinary one answer the monstrous one without a speech. Curtis is the hinge: taken into the governess’s care, he is offered shelter by an adult who needs something from him, and the film treats that danger with a seriousness I hadn’t expected from a story that also contains a talking eagle.
The handwork is staggering. Reportedly 231 puppets move through 136 sets, and the crowd scenes, the climactic battle above all, deliver a spectacle I never thought stop-motion could carry. The faces are doll-like enough to suit a fairy tale and never slide into the uncanny. Dario Marianelli’s score leans on folk textures, a fitting gesture toward Colin Meloy, whose novel (illustrated by Carson Ellis) supplied the story and whose band, The Decemberists, supplies something of the spirit. It is Travis Knight’s first stop-motion feature since Kubo and the Two Strings. The violence it’s M (recommended for 15+) rating, Laika’s first, so this is no film for small children.
The first half takes its time getting engaged, and the film juggles Prue’s quest, Curtis’s, and a thread about the forest’s rival factions that never gathers weight. A scheming official’s subplot adds almost nothing. A few jokes arrive exactly where feeling was needed and puncture it. I noticed each of these, and none of them changed my mind, because they are the faults of a film reaching too far, which I prefer to the alternative.
Wildwood suits anyone who has written off animated fantasy as children’s business, and anyone with a taste for fairy tales that mean what they say. Give the first half its time and the second half repays it.