What If Wildwood Is Secretly About Liberal Infighting?

I’m not sure if Wildwood set out to be a movie about liberal infighting, but that’s kind of where it ends up, and given the context of Laika’s latest stop-motion wonder, the comparison doesn’t come out of nowhere. Wildwood is based on a 2011 novel written by Decemberists front man Colin Meloy, and while it’s a fantasy adventure about a young woman who ventures into a magical realm to rescue her kidnapped brother, it’s also very much about the culture of Portland, Oregon, where it begins, and whose suburbs are Laika’s home base. While Wildwood pokes gentle fun at the crunchy-quirky culture the city is known for, from the street vendor urging people to support handmade art “before it’s gone for good” to the unicyclist riding by in a Darth Vader helmet while playing the bagpipes, it’s fundamentally celebratory in its depiction of the place.

It’s Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who’s feeling impatient with the granola-and-tabletop-game mildness of her hometown, down to the loving but immature parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) who task her with taking care of her much younger brother Mac while they head off to a craft fair for the day. What’s a fundamentally well-behaved but cynical teenager looking to rebel against the culture in which she was raised to do? Realistically, Prue would probably start dabbling in TradCath Twitter, but in the movie, she takes Mac on bike ride, despite her parents explicitly forbidding her from bringing the toddler outside. It’s a normal, brightly lit day in the city, until a murder of crows gathers ominously around the playground she’s brought him to, then descend upon the boy and carry him off to the misty woods beyond a train trestle, into a strange wilderness that Prue and her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who tags along, previously thought was impassible. 

There’s a moment at the end of every Laika film in which the filmmakers break the illusion of movement that makes its characters come to life and show the sets and models they’re working with, the human scurrying around in a blur to pose and repose and photograph in the painstaking labor of stop-motion animation. It inevitably brings me to tears, this acknowledgment of how much care and work goes into the way these movies are made, frame by frame, even if the studio supplements the very analog art at the core of its productions with digital effects. But the material all that effort goes into supporting isn’t always as impressive, and Wildwood, which was adapted by Laika stalwart Chris Butler and directed by the company’s CEO, Travis Knight, is a film that travels along the borders of something resonant without ever getting there. Its magical forest is filled with talking animals, tree-worshipping mystics, scheming functionaries, and the Dowager Governess (Carey Mulligan), an enchantress who commands an army of uniformed coyotes. She’s a wrecker who’s determined to resurrect her dead son through a horrifying process that may also destroy everything, and while the other inhabitants of the woods fear her, they’ve also been unable to form any kind of coalition against her.

A lot of these elements are so obviously borrowed from other sources, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Lord of the Rings to Labyrinth, that it’s impossible to latch onto any of it, even as the movie renders these adventures in moodily autumnal splendor befitting a story about two characters who are being rushed into the darkly grown-up situations they thought they wanted. (Prue’s face, which is both childlike and wizened, is wonderfully devoid of the de rigueur Pixar/Dreamworks cuteness.) The Dowager Governess is a White Witch–esque former aristocrat who goes from maternal to ruthless as she leads her animal forces in battles that leave a hefty amount of corpses behind (this is only a film for younger children if they’re ready for some psychological scarring). The Governor (Marc Evan Jackson) of the main town is a conflict-avoidant fool counseled by the Gríma Wormtongue–like Roger Swindon (Jemaine Clement). Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal), the head of the robe-wearing spiritual types living in the agricultural northern region, acts at a pace that brings to mind the Ents.

There’s too much here to be effectively explored in a feature, even a 131-minute one whose length is all the more impressive given how arduous stop-motion is as a process. But the familiarity of the fantasy elements and the brusqueness with which they’re treated would be forgivable if Wildwood did a better job exploring how the real world connects to the magical side of the story. At the heart of this movie is a tantalizing hint of an exasperation that’s not just that of a teenager, but of a generation. The factions in the woods are echoes of Wildwood’s selective depiction of Portland — the hippies who’d rather commune with the trees than deal with what’s in danger of harming them, the city bureaucrats who’d rather bury themselves in paperwork than take action, the displaced Indigenous people (with a leader voiced by Mahershala Ali) who’ve been driven off their land and, in ways the movie doesn’t handle very deftly, into “we only take what we need” banditry. Prue spends a fair amount of the movie wandering from place to place, asking for help from authority figures who aren’t capable of giving it.

Built into those scenes, as well as into the movie’s depiction of Prue’s sweetly ineffectual parents (who are definitely vaccine hesitant), is a frustration with adults who’ve never embraced the mantle of leadership and who don’t seem to feel any obligation to set aside their own desires and obsessions for the good of those around them. This turns out to be why Mac was taken in the first place, as well as why the Dowager Governess is willing to rip the world open in order to be reunited with her own child. But it’s also why none of the factions in the woods appear capable of working together. As they fight among themselves, Prue’s anger briefly feels like that of a Gen-Zer watching the grown-ups who should be in charge bicker instead of fighting back. And then it dissolves back into a disappointingly generic fantasy battle that, for all the spectacular craft that went into it, is all too forgettable.