Wildwood review: Epic animated adventure pulses with life, fueled by love

There’s a fleeting moment in the magnificent new animated film Wildwood where you see a poster for indie rock band The Decemberists in the bedroom of the lead character.

It clicks. The American band is known for its expansive storytelling across their albums where each song really is like a chapter in a book of folk legends. The Decemberists has sung about forest queens and shape-shifters, crane wives and mournful ghosts.

Dark fairytale Wildwood is a very Decemberists-coded film, which makes sense because Colin Meloy, the band’s frontman, co-wrote the novel with his wife Carson Ellis on which this movie is based.

Wildwood is an epic 16 years in the making from Laika, the animation studio behind lauded films including Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Wildwood is an excellent addition to its library, a sweeping fantasy adventure that pricks as much as it enchants.

It’s a big swing movie that could easily be characterised as a magnum opus for filmmaker Travis Knight who, like the characters in the film, is creatively putting everything on the line. It pays off, not just for Knight, but for the audience.

You can’t help but be in complete awe at this breathtaking cinematic achievement.

You can be impressed by the painstaking craftsmanship it takes to make an intricate stop-motion picture, the 1000 crew who with care created these figures, the 140,000-plus faces printed for each frame, and animated them over thousands of hours. The animation period alone took five years.

But none of that technical prowess means that much if you don’t match it with emotional scale and sophisticated storytelling. Wildwood is a marriage of all those elements.

The story is set in the woods outside the American city of Portland, a town known for its alternative vibes (and indie music!), centred on the character of Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a young teenage girl whose parents (Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson) are intensely over-protective of her baby brother, Mac.

She sneaks her brother for a day out when a murder of crows swoop in aggressively and abducts Mac, taking him to the impassable woods, a place of magic, darkness and danger.

Prue, along with classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), rush to follow and the thicket of ivy strangely opens to let them through.

The woods are filled with fantastical creatures and places, with talking animals and birds, militant coyotes in uniform, fearsome bandits locked up in high cages (the voice talents of Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Richard E. Grant, Tom Waits, Awkwafina, Charlie Day and more), and the villainous dowager governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan).

Alexandra is a tragic figure, a once-benevolent ruler whose grief over the loss of her son consumed her whole being. She will do anything to reclaim even a moment with her dead child, and that puts her and Prue at odds.

She is both loathsome and sympathetic, and the character is a compelling portrait of contradiction, of how multitudes can – and should - exist in one person. You can be repulsed by her and still have empathy, and still be unsure exactly how you feel hours after the end of the film.

Wildwood is comfortable with that discomfort and builds its story about heroism in that greyness.

But there’s nothing drab about this film, it pulses with energy, fuelled by love and righteousness, not just in its story but as a work which deeply respects and adores hand-crafted animation as an artform. In this age of rising AI use, that counts for a lot.

It is however, not for young kids. It opens with a dramatic act, and there is quite a lot of violence and death, at one point, a battle scene that could be Braveheart, if Braveheart was animated and had a charging coyote cavalry.

It sounds odd but when that sequence arrives it makes perfect sense.

Be prepared to be swept along for this spirited, imaginative adventure that grabs you by the heart from the first frame until the last.

Rating: 4.5/5

Wildwood is in cinemas from October 22