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This film has been promising to be epic for a little while now. It’s been coming a long time, having been in the making in one sense or another for a decade and a half with production being announced five years ago. A ‘special feature’ trailer dropped in May that showed same very impressive footage and indicated an ambitious story reminiscent of Tolkien and Lewis, with possibly even a touch of George R.R. Martin. Released stills shared some incredible looking scenery, handmade as backdrops for the evidently sophisticated maquette work and recently it was announced that at two hours and fifteen minutes it was the longest ever stop motion movie, passing previous title holder, Del Toro’s Pinocchio, by close to half an hour. The growing feeling was that Wildwood was going to be something very special.
Too much to live up to perhaps?
Nah!
This movie is truly spectacular. You’ll watch it and wonder how the hell they did this in this animation medium, then you’ll get drawn into the action and forget before remembering and being wowed all over again, and then again. Nothing like this has ever been achieved using model animation and while it is clearly CG augmented this is just something else to celebrate as the blending of these methods is seamless and shows a great command of varied filmmaking technique. Wildwood lives up to promise and then some, and then some more. It’s a genuine masterpiece.
In terms of the action/animation there are two stand out scenes; an air chase and a huge battle at the end that is among the best ever captured on screen, in any type of cinema. The smaller moments, while smaller, are almost as impressive though. I was as blown away by a close up of a character tensing his toes almost as much as any soaring birds or clashing armies. Studio Laika have been breaking ground in this arena since Coraline but this is as different to that as that was to anything that came before. They are not Aardman but there has long been an equal similarity to their character design, but here the puppets are smother and softer and altogether more sophisticated.
Crucially the narrative matches the scope of the artistry. This is a story that reflects the great tales of magic and nature but also examines notions of family and loss that are as real as its other elements are fantastic. This almost matches Philip Pullman and David Mitchell in how it contemporises the genre, based and building on the source material from Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, and while it reflects the work of all of the aforementioned and everything else from Labyrinth to The Wind in the Willows via Miyazaki – with the darkness and humour of all of them, it still feels new and exciting.
Wildwood is great cinema that escapes the by its nature limitations of the particular medium it is made in. This kind of aspiration is rare in Hollywood (although this studio operates out of Portland where the film is delightfully set) and is risky but sometimes, every so often, it really pays off. If you’ve heard the hype, believe it.
