Movie Review
Wildwood
9/10
TLDR
LAIKA didn’t come to play in the kiddie pool. Wildwood is a massive, dark, occasionally brutal stop-motion epic with real stakes, a ridiculously stacked voice cast and handmade wonder in every frame. Too intense for the littlest ones, but older kids and grown-ups are in for a feast.
Where to watch: In theaters October 23
The Facts
Synopsis: When a murder of crows carries her baby brother into the forbidden woods at the edge of Portland, Prue McKeel and her tagalong classmate Curtis follow him into Wildwood, a hidden world of talking animals, bandits and warring factions.
Director: Travis Knight
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett
Rated: PG-13 for strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language
Running Length: 132 minutes
The Thoughts
LAIKA did not come to play in the kiddie pool with Wildwood. The Portland studio behind Coraline has spent twenty years proving stop-motion can be scary, sad and wonderfully strange, but its first PG-13 film goes further than any of them, and I mean that as the highest compliment. LAIKA’s Wildwood is a massive, dark, occasionally brutal fantasy epic and an absolute creative wonder to behold. Heads roll, blood flies, and characters are stabbed, beaten and threatened with sacrifice, yet none of it feels tossed in for shock value. There are real stakes here, and LAIKA refuses to sand them down just because this happens to be animation.
LAIKA’s Wildwood Follows the Crows
It starts on an ordinary day in Portland, Oregon, when a murder of crows swoops down on a playground and carries off Prue McKeel’s baby brother, Mac. Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Andi Mack) does what any big sister with something to prove would do and chases them straight into the Impassable Wilderness, the forbidden forest every Portland kid is raised to steer clear of. Tagging along, uninvited, is her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay, Room), a gangly, good-hearted kid who would much rather read about an adventure than have one.
What they find on the other side is Wildwood, a whole country hiding in the trees. There are coyote soldiers stuffed into ill-fitting military coats, forest outlaws, a kingdom of birds and a buttoned-up government running things from a mansion, plus a grieving Dowager Governess named Alexandra (Carey Mulligan, Maestro) with big plans for all of it.
Chris Butler (ParaNorman) adapts the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, with illustrations by his wife, Carson Ellis. It’s Butler’s first adapted screenplay, and he sticks close to the book while poking at every fantasy convention he touches. His guiding question was what a coyote would actually say if it could talk, and the answer is rarely comforting.
Directing is LAIKA’s own president and CEO, Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings), who also directed this summer’s unfairly ignored Masters of the Universe from another Butler script. That gives Knight two highly entertaining movies in 2026, and I find it pretty amusing that the stop-motion one is eons more violent than the live-action where everybody swings a giant sword.
A Voice Cast That Just Keeps Going
The voice cast is ridiculously stacked. Mulligan, Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Tom Waits (Seven Psychopaths), Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), Awkwafina (The Farewell), Charlie Day (Pacific Rim)… the list just keeps going, and each one of them commits to every strange corner of this world.
Alexandra could easily have been another fairy tale villain in a fabulous gown, and the gown is fabulous, but Mulligan plays her as a mother first, someone whose grief has hardened into something dangerous. The prologue gives us a hint of why, a glimpse of the loss that broke her, and it’s enough that you understand her even while she horrifies you.
Lee gives Prue the impatient confidence of a kid who thinks she’s already a grown-up, and Tremblay makes Curtis’s bumbling bravery easy to root for. Ali brings real weight to Brendan, the Bandit King, while Bassett gives the General, a giant golden eagle, so much authority that LAIKA didn’t bother putting her in a costume. Grant voices the theatrical Owl Rex the same weekend he turns up in Wicker, so this is officially his weekend.
My one small nitpick: I do wonder why the women in these stop-motion films so often look haggard in the face while the men get smooth faces and features. Even the young ones have crow’s feet and droopy eyelids, which feels like a lot of crows for one movie. I’m sure the designers can explain it, but it’s a pattern I’d love to see LAIKA break next time.
Sixteen Years of Fingerprints
In the press notes, Knight likes to say he’s been making Wildwood for sixteen years, then admits the more honest answer is his entire life. The production counts 233 handcrafted puppets, 132 practical sets and 142,030 3D-printed replacement faces, about a third more than their last film, Missing Link, needed, all nudged into place by 49 animators. The climactic battle runs nearly 12 minutes across 411 shots, the biggest ever staged for a stop-motion feature, and at 132 minutes, Wildwood is the longest stop-motion feature ever made. Even baby Mac is a family affair: he’s voiced by Knight’s infant son, whose cries were recorded during diaper changes.
Knight’s secret weapon is cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Lion King), the 82-year-old, six-time Oscar nominee shooting his first film since that 2019 remake and his first stop-motion film ever. He brings his signature dreamy realism to a world built at a fraction of human scale, lighting puppets like actors on a live-action set and borrowing from Hitchcock’s The Birds for the crows’ attack on the playground. It’s brilliant, beautiful work, Hollywood’s grand scale shrunk down to a puppet’s height.
Production designer Nelson Lowry (Fantastic Mr. Fox), an Oregon native, turns Portland into a love letter, Powell’s City of Books and Pittock Mansion included, then sets the forest ablaze in autumn reds and golds. Dario Marianelli (Paddington 2) delivers another small masterpiece of a score, supporting each battle, each heartbreak and each emotional beat, and The Decemberists send you out with a new song, “The Better Part of Bravery.” There’s a lot of heartbreak to support, too: 67 shots feature visible tears, more than ten times LAIKA’s previous record.
Stay for the closing credits, where LAIKA slips in glimpses of the artists at work. Those few seconds prove that great art is something people sweat blood and tears over, and I already can’t wait for the making-of bonus features when it comes home in 4K. In a year when so much of what we watch feels smoothed over by algorithms and AI shortcuts, Knight’s statement in the press notes sums up why stop-motion still matters in five words: “The real answer is care.” You can feel it in every frame.
Take the Cool Uncle’s Advice
Wildwood takes its PG-13 rating very seriously, pushing about as far as an animated film can go before it picks up an R, with strong fantasy violence, bloody images and themes that aren’t meant for pre-teens. This is absolutely not one for the littlest kids. It’s the movie the cool uncles take their nieces and nephews to, and the one adults can see solo without feeling like they have to sit in the corner away from the birthday parties.
In spirit, it sits much closer to Princess Mononoke or Pan’s Labyrinth than to anything with a toy aisle attached, a fairy tale where the forest has politics and war has a body count. Beyond a few Narnia-esque vibes at times, it also reminded me of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, with Prue working against magical forces to retrieve her baby brother. For those of us who wince when parents bring kids into R-rated features they definitely aren’t ready for, here’s the better option. It entertains the whole family, and that lengthy runtime flies by while giving everyone full value for their ticket.
Try Wildwood
LAIKA has been pushing the boundaries since Coraline in 2009, which still holds up brilliantly today, and ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and Missing Link each built on that first leap. Every one of them earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and not one of them took the statue home. LAIKA spent seven years making its first feature since Missing Link, and you can practically see all that time, labor and imagination in every frame of LAIKA’s Wildwood.
We gripe so much about the lack of original, creative work in movies lately, and to that I say, try Wildwood. Start clearing a space in the Animated Feature race now, because if ambition, artistry and sheer handmade movie magic count for anything, Wildwood is going to be very hard to beat.
The Final
Wildwood is the answer to everyone griping that Hollywood has run out of original ideas. It’s dark, gorgeous, big-hearted and built by hand, and if ambition and artistry count for anything, it’s going to be very hard to beat.
9/10
Where to watch: In theaters October 23
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
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