Wildwood review: Five stars for a stop-motion wonder destined to become a classic for the ages
Even if the latest animation from Laika, the stop-motion home of the diligent Travis Knight, had not turned out to be a wonder, one would still feel obliged to praise the makers of Wildwood for their bravery. In an era of endless sequels and reboots, here is family entertainment that dares to mark out its own territory. No other mainstream animation house would allow this degree of angst, peril and actual death. The fantasy begins with something like a suicide and goes on to take in martial slaughter on a medieval scale. Yet, despite its sense of murky jeopardy, it remains an oblique charmer throughout. The film is set around Portland, Oregon, and it wants you to know it. Young Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is living the rough-wool, matted-hair, mung-bean life characteristic of that post-hippie locale with parents who tick every homeschooled box. At one point they note that an emergency caused them to try every mad solution, “even western medicine”. Prue enjoys a largely untroubled adolescence, but some sort of secret is nagging at the family’s messy idyll. Why are the parents so protective of Prue’s baby brother, Mac? (His cries are those of the director’s own son.) Anyone who has ever heard a fairy tale will suspect that some pact with malign forces is at the root of the mystery. Forgotten Island review: A plot that breaks up into a kaleidoscope of surreal adventure Anyway, one day, defying her mum’s instructions to keep the child at home, Prue brings him to a coffee shop and then on for adventures in the school playground. In a neat allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the jungle gym (“climbing frame” to us) is soon obscured by a colossal murder of crows. The animals descend on the children, pluck poor Mac from Prue’s protection and transport him into the looming woods that abut this version of the United States’s most organic city. Adapted from a popular novel by Colin Meloy, founder of the rock band The Decemberists, Wildwood, as that synopsis demonstrates, is rich with reminders of ancient folklore and more recent fantasy: CS Lewis , JRR Tolkien , Philip Pullman . Dare one suggest there is also (accidentally, I’m sure) a bit of Rupert the Bear in the unsettling anthropomorphic supporting characters? We soon learn that much of the evil in Wildwood is down to the dominance of a bitter, frustrated presence known as the dowager governess Alexandra (voiced throatily by Carey Mulligan ). She is wicked witch, evil stepsister, Pullman’s Mrs Coulter. She is also convincingly tragic, damaged by believable human catastrophes. There is a beautiful originality to the animation, the characters moving with a natural dip and bob that stop-motion rarely manages. It helps that Caleb Deschanel, the veteran cinematographer behind The Right Stuff, lights each shot with more creative invention than you would expect from the widest live-action epic. This will almost certainly be the best-looking animated feature you see this year. The voice cast is also beyond compare: Tom Waits , Richard E Grant , Awkwafina, Angela Bassett and on and on. Should we worry about who the film is for? Set in an anti-present that, once in the woods, blends Victorian with dark ages – Alexandra’s coyote henchman are dressed like hussars – Knight’s entertainment, stretching past two hours, demands more attention than the vast majority of talking animal flicks. And there is no getting away from the impressive levels of slaughter. The closing battles dare to stretch out into complex martial symphonies that might gain approval from even Akira Kurosawa . This is the sort of film that parents might assume will bore or terrify children. Such thinking has too often governed the decisions of panicky studio heads who haven’t bothered to investigate the unsettling tales of the Brothers Grimm (or even the nastier corners of Roald Dahl ). The film may struggle to gain huge audiences on release, but it will surely settle in as a classic for the ages. In cinemas from Friday, October 23rd