Wildwood

This exhilaratingly brilliant film might be stop-motion animation’s answer to The Odyssey. It’s another of those cinematic spectacles you walk away from wondering how they did it and feeling incredibly glad that they did. 

Wildwood is Laika’s best film, no mean feat with classics like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings behind them. Oregon’s answer to Aardman and Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon, the stop-motion studio dedicates itself to the craft pioneered by giants like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Wildwood took a mindblowing 231 weeks to make but looks like it might have taken a thousand. Soaking up the detail of its hand-crafted worlds is an all-enveloping experience: from dark, Grimm brothers-esque woods and thunderous battles to the more relatable surrounds of a boho present-day Portland full of artisanal coffee shops and beard-and-beanie hipsters. 

Somewhere in there is a sequence borrowed from Hitchcock’s The Birds, an early sign that director Travis Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler are about to one-up the scarifying shocks of Coraline with proper, 12A-rated perils. Crows gather on a Portland climbing frame as stubborn teenager Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) watches her baby brother, Mac, play. When he’s carried away by the birds to the nearby ‘Impassable Woods’, she’s off on a rescue mission, sweeping up her nerdy, plucky classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) in her wake. It’s everything her parents have warned her about, and all the legends in her childhood bedtime stories are about to come true.

Every frame is a joy to behold

There’s a genius in taking inspiration from Tolkien, CS Lewis, even Amblin, Labyrinth and Stephen King’s Stand By Me and still managing to forge a story this fresh. The cast of characters this pair of ‘Outsiders’ meet in the Wildwoods are richly drawn and memorable, from the kingdom’s dowager governess (Carey Mulligan), whose grief has curdled into something menacing, to the big-hearted bandit leader (Mahershala Ali) whose tribe stand defiantly against her and her coyote army. Even Awkwafina’s gobby rodent, Septima, is not that annoying. 

And every frame is a joy to behold, with the crunch of leaves on the Pacific Northwest forest floor, skies full of swooping birds and battlefields strewn with corpses. Knight, Laika’s governor, has been on a journey of his own, making a couple of so-so live-action blockbusters (Masters of the Universe, Bumblebee). He returns to home turf to crank up the action, with a visceral dogfight between the warring avians of Wildwood and a battle scene with shades of Gladiator’s opening showdown. 

Wildwood is the perfect handmade antidote to AI – a little (big) slice of cinema magic.

In UK and Ireland cinemas now.