It's felt like some time since we last saw anything from stopmotion specialists Laika: 2019's fun Yeti saga Missing Link was such a crushing commercial flop (budget: $100m, take: $27m) it put paid to a major studio distribution deal. It turns out the company has spent some of this spell in the wilderness working on the most magnum of opuses. At 132 minutes, Wildwood will likely be the longest of the animated features pitched into awards battle this year; it also seems certain to be the most detailed and the most involved. This is, recognisably, the work of a studio determining to go its own way, stretching both its limbs and its resources to the max. (Again, the budget is reported as in the region of $100m.) A 2011 novel by Colin Maloy - hitherto best known as the frontman of hipster faves The Decemberists - allows director (and Laika honcho) Travis Knight to commingle the real and the fantastical in the form of two adjacent kingdoms. After a brisk and charming snapshot of a stopmotion Portland - hipster coffee shops, hipster parents, vaguely resentful-seeming offspring - the narrative suddenly yanks us into a nearby woodland known as The Impassable Wilderness, a fairytale land ruled over by a Romanov-style dynasty yet populated chiefly by talking animals. Either Maloy or Knight appears to have a soft spot for Labyrinth, a film now forty years young: our bipedal teenage heroine Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) heads deep into the woods to rescue her baby brother, snatched away from a Portland playground by a murder of crows operating by royal command. By chance, Pru drags along a younger contemporary, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who's soon recruited by the tyrannical regime as a potential soldier boy (or mere cannon fodder) and sent out on a grim whistlestop tour of this mirror world's mud-and-blood-smeared battlefields. We're not just getting one fairytale, then; at various points in Wildwood, it seems as though we're getting a whole compendium of them.
If there's a lot of it, there's also much to like, beyond the ambient sensation we're getting our money's worth. Wildwood is undeniably ambitious in its scope and often beautiful with it: we find this wilderness in autumn, which grants every frame an extra visual dynamism. Knight's animators are masters of shades and lighting, while their character modelling grew on me: these faces aren't Disney-perfect - they have lines and wrinkles, gaps in their teeth - but they're all the more distinctive and expressive for that. It's reassuring to encounter a modern mass-market animation that isn't perpetually winking at us, that wants its every narrative beat to land and count; it's also that rarity, a multiplex animation that knows how to make its (spectacular) setpieces count, that isn't just busy for the sake of being busy. There's only one problem, and it's a big one: Wildwood is clogged up with story, and some of these beats are so elaborate there are places where you sense the movie struggling to move forwards at all. (Worse: every now and again, it has the drab feel of homework, like something we're going to be tested on.) Knight has determined to give us so much fairytale he loses the simplicity of the best fairytales; like the ivy that blights the Impassable Wilderness, this script needed pruning. (And maybe a few more jokes? It feels like Laika laid off their gagwriters in the wake of Missing Link's failure.) I wonder whether Wildwood will be to Laika what Princess Mononoke or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya were to Studio Ghibli: animation that heads adore, but which struggles to cross over to the mass audience in the way the lighter, simpler Spirited Away and Ponyo did. (And I worry, given the time and money spent on Knight's film, and Laika's recent commercial track record.) Granted, you could argue any Western animation that inspires comparison with Ghibli has to be doing something right, and in an age where we've grown complacent about the miracle of animation - and the miracle of stopmotion in particular - Wildwood will at least inspire you to wonder anew how on earth these animators did that. It's just that the sleight-of-hand it sets before us proves altogether too convoluted to be as dazzling as one had hoped.
Wildwood opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.
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