Wildwood: Laika’s Masterpiece
You had better see Wildwood in theaters where it belongs before it’s gone. The film is already leaving all my local AMC theaters after Wednesday night, but with how I feel about it, I’m shocked it’s not doing well enough to stay through December. This isn’t my first rumble with Laika—I’m a long-time Coraline fan, having gone to the re-release as well, and I remember seeing The Boxtrolls during its stay in theaters. But Wildwood is on another level I haven’t seen from Laika before, and something I haven’t felt in an animated film since The Wild Robot. Maybe it’s the thrill of ever-present nature in films like this, but I walked out of that auditorium speechless with my jaw still on the floor from the spectacle of it all.
From the earliest trailers, the buzz around Laika’s Wildwood echoed throughout the cinemagoer space. This movie was always going to be something special. The hands of Laika never fail to make an atmosphere feel alive, yet even here I felt something unlike any animated film I’d seen in recent memory. Every creature, plant, and cloud is another step towards a sprawling world that never ends. The look in a character’s eyes at any given moment conveys their complicated thoughts, grappling with the grim reality of the situation unfolding within their homeland. And said characters, whether human or beast, have such distinct designs and body language that indicate their role in this sanctuary, their importance among the deep evil and grief brewing in the forest.
This is one of my favorite shots from the film we were talking about on the way home. There’s never a dull moment of discussion with Wildwood—there’s never a dull moment period. The story grabs your hand from the start and never lets go, festering and spiraling into something so grandiose and fierce that there’s nothing I can compare it to. It all culminates in a graphic, emotional, heartbreaking yet heartwarming climax that makes me ever proud of the cinematic landscape we’ve found ourselves in.
Even as generative AI becomes unavoidable and saturates our own world, I would argue this has been a fantastic year for human art. Much of the cinema that’s released this year so bravely demonstrates the beauty of human nature and the community it can bring. I’m really grateful to be able to do this every month, to see the latest in what we can put together and weave into a story so personal to its creators, and expands into something just as important to so many more who experience it. This story demands the amount of production that went into it, nothing less. Over five years of production and it shows in every frame, every facial expression, and every performance. It all comes together for an emotional tour de force that I’m happy to call one of my favorite films of the whole year. It’s an absolute miracle, the crown jewel of Travis Knight’s filmography, and deserving of the magnum opus title everyone mentions for its placement among the other Laika films.
Wildwood is now in theaters nationwide.