Because of Coraline, LAIKA’s first effort as a studio and still its best-known, there’s an expectation that each subsequent project will fit comfortably within the horror realm, each new release a rite of passage for thousands of kids previously unaware that movies could give them nightmares. This will inevitably be the same case with Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s lavish and ambitious adaptation of the 2011 YA novel by Decemberists lead singer Colin Meloy, not least because it cold-opens with a young boy committing suicide, ripping out his insides to reveal he was an automaton operated by cogs. The gothic imagery hardly subsides from there, with Knight soon recreating the haunting image from Hitchcock’s The Birds, a murder of crows swarming over a playground ready to feast on unsuspecting children.
Labelling a LAIKA production a straightforward riff on horror hasn’t been accurate since 2012’s Paranorman––their weakest, most surface-level referential effort––with the studio’s work since then better appreciated as part of an ongoing attempt to revive other genres unfashionable with today’s kids. It’s won them as much acclaim as it has come at a cost; Missing Link, their 2019 globe-trotting adventure that’s partway between Jules Verne and The Lost City of Z, holds the title for most expensive stop-motion film of all-time, and made the smallest fraction of that cost back.
Wildwood might be an easier sell as a modern-day fairytale, but it doesn’t make any concessions to what children might want or expect from such a proposition—more Brothers Grimm by way of Tolkien than Disney. If it does have a contemporary parallel, it’s with the equally dark, unsanitized female empowerment tales of Hayao Miyazaki, where wonder and grimness co-exist as they did in the oldest bedtime stories. Characters are shaped forever by the darkness they encounter as much as they are thrilled by any fantastical, otherworldly creatures who cross their path, all of whom are crafted with an attention to detail unrivaled within their respective forms of animation.
After the prologue, we head to modern-day Portland, where Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) has been tasked with babysitting her baby brother Mac, advised by her hippie parents (Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) not to take him outside. It’s a rule she breaks often, but their carefree trip into the city that morning ends in disaster when crows swarm over her brother in the playground and whisk him off to the vast woods surrounding the city. Along with nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), they venture into the unknown, even though they’ve long been warned that the overgrown forests are impossible to enter.
Mysteriously, a path opens for the pair, who are soon separated after encountering an anthropomorphic coyote army; Prue makes it to a nearby town, where she’s held captive as an outsider. Jacob is taken to meet the former governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) who, instead of treating him as a captive, sees him as a replacement for the long-dead son of whom she’s repeatedly tried to build a replica. Alexandra is holding baby Mac for sinister reasons just as tensions among the different clans in the woods have grown worse due to the actions of her army; saving her brother means having to save the realm from her.
There’s an eeriness to Wildwood that never becomes fully fleshed horror, toeing the line when it comes to the limits of darkness in a fairytale; it earns its PG-13 rating before we’re even a minute into the runtime, and that’s just Knight testing the waters of acceptability. It’s easy to write this off as the director and his screenwriter Chris Butler targeting a slightly older audience who are weaned on campfire ghost stories and on the cusp of seeing their first scary movie at a sleepover, but as with Miyazaki’s coming-of-age tales, I see this as the distinct work of creatives who trust their young viewers’ intelligence, knowing that they can handle something darker than what’s offered by rival animation studios. It’s only because it’s in stop-motion that this darkness is presented as novel.
Adaptations of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other widely read fantasy authors from most people’s childhoods have been embraced by young viewers, after all, and in its character designs and staging of sweeping action sequences, Wildwood frequently invites the lofty comparisons to Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy that it manages to live up to. Yes, it’s on a smaller scale because of the limits of a team of stop-motion animators, but that a battle scene can feel positively reminiscent of Jackson’s Helm’s Deep––even when it pauses to breathe amidst the chaos to show how the violence may scar its characters forever––is one of several technical achievements that don’t call themselves out as such. The soaring aerial sequences, gag-a-minute slapstick chase scenes, and transformation of the sets as reeds quickly grow on every surface represent some of the most ambitious moments the studio has ever put to life. In the moment, it’s easy to look past how the enormous scale of this ambition is paying off; the movie satisfies the heart so much that the head stops seeking to work out how they did it.
The majority of LAIKA efforts close with a mid-credits, behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking work that went into creating their character models and expansive sets. As much as they want you to be transported into their lovingly crafted worlds, they’re magicians who have no issues revealing their secrets, and part of the charm of Wildwood is seeing just how the sausage gets made before heading to the exit. We’re in a period where studio animation is becoming increasingly risk-averse, and there’s something oddly moving about seeing a member of Knight’s team walk us through the process of designing characters.
The movie may not resonate with younger audiences or even attract many of them into the theater to begin with, but just like the famous line about how the few who first heard The Velvet Underground & Nico formed their own bands, it offers the hope that the kids who do see it will be inspired to make art of their own. For anybody older, it’s a reminder of the magic and terror of the classic fantasy stories we grew up with recaptured on a breathtaking scale. It’s among the best animated films in recent memory.
Wildwood premiered at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival and opens on October 23.
The post BFI London Review: Wildwood Presents Magic and Terror on a Breathtaking Scale first appeared on The Film Stage.
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