FLYING HIGH

This Should Be the First Animated Film to Win Best Picture

The new stop-motion animated film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

Laika Studios’ Wildwood, which just premiered at the London Film Festival, is an incredible feat. It’s a major leap forward in stop-motion animation, and its epic story perfectly balances familiar elements with new ideas, cleverly using fairytale conventions to bring audiences along while throwing in impressive, robust surprises along the way. It’s totally exhilarating, and left the packed audience at my screening in complete awe.

It might also be the first animated film ever to win the coveted Best Picture Oscar.

Wildwood opens on a typical day in Portland, Oregon, when 12-year-old Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) takes her brother out into town for the day. Her parents warned her not to take her baby brother outside, but hey, what’s the worst that could happen?

Well, while at the playground, Prue’s brother is kidnapped by a murder of crows.

Prue and her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) follow the crows to the impassable wilderness. It’s an impenetrable forest of mysterious happenings. Neither of them has ever been inside—after all, no human can enter. Yet somehow, the pair find themselves gaining entrance into the impassable wilderness, where they uncover a strange world of talking animals and a complicated kingdom. Getting Prue’s brother back will be one hell of a challenge.

What Laika has done with Wildwood cannot be undersold. This film balances dozens of memorable, gorgeously designed characters and places them in a vast kingdom brimming with jaw-dropping animation, plus staggeringly choreographed set pieces that culminate in one of the most impressive battle sequences in recent memory.

It’s easy to fall into hyperbole, but this is undeniable: You’ve never seen anything like this movie. Movies like Wildwood are why cinemas exist in the first place.

Wildwood also has a character we’ve not seen in animation in what feels like forever: a villain for the ages. It’s been a long time since American animation has given us a villain as eternal as Ursula, Maleficent, or even Lord Farquaad.

But in dowager governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), we get one. The land Alexandra rules was once benevolent, full of harmony. But ever since she was torn apart by grief over the tragic death of her son, Alexandra has ruled with malice, turning the once utopian land into a place of violence and double crossings. Alexandra is deliciously complex and deeply compelling, and her unpredictable nature twinned with her overwhelming sadness makes her a terrifying threat to Prue, Curtis, and everyone in the land.

As western animation is drowning in a sea of familiar intellectual property and sequels galore, Wildwood is a glowing balm that reminds us how powerful original storytelling can be. This is a celebration of human ingenuity as much as it is a phenomenally entertaining adventure of warring factions and magical creatures, dealing with powerful, complicated themes of grief, family, and identity.

So much of Western animation is determined to keep kids comfortable at all costs with bright colors and goofy gags. But Laika and Wildwood are smarter than that, and this film happily pushes kids outside that complacency, delivering an experience they won’t soon forget. It’s profound enough to be this generation’s The Lion King.

But does Wildwood really have a shot at a Best Picture nomination—let alone a win? Absolutely.

It would join some exclusive company: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010) are the only three animated movies to ever receive the most prestigious nomination. All three share something with Wildwood: distinctly adult elements that separate them from being purely “family-friendly.”

Beauty and the Beast offers up a sumptuous romance, Up shattered hearts with its unforgettable “Married Life” sequence, and Toy Story 3 made an entire generation weep with its incinerator moment—and pretty much every scene in the final 20 minutes. These three films are marked by their ambition and commitment to go beyond what most people expect from a “cartoon.”

Wildwood is, by some distance, the most ambitious movie Laika has ever made. It’s a whopping 132 minutes—in American animation, only Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim are longer. But neither of those movies are stop-motion, and Wildwood is the longest theatrical stop-motion movie ever made.

Its sheer scale is borderline unbelievable. You have never seen a stop-motion movie, or honestly any animated movie, doing what Laika is doing in Wildwood. I found myself frequently mouth agape, in utter astonishment at what was in front of me. When you realize every single thing you’re seeing is lovingly hand-crafted, it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye (it brought several to mine).

It’s also one of the more adult animated movies to be made by an American studio. The themes are heavy, and the violence is too. There’s a lot of blood and legitimately gnarly violence. Bodies literally pile up, and I found myself amazed at how far Wildwood was willing to go. There are some very adorable characters (shout out to the tiny bird and a cuddly-looking rabbit), but this movie has no interest in kowtowing to cheap jokes and gags to rope in young kids. This is a terrific time for the whole family—as long as your kids are in the double digits. It has a PG-13 rating for a reason.

Both of these things speak to its chances of a Best Picture nomination. What speaks even higher is that the film is nothing short of being completely and utterly spectacular.

Wildwood is a sensational celebration of what artists can do when they come together in the name of creation. Wildwood deserves a Best Picture nomination—and maybe even a win—because it’s the best movie of the year.

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Barry LevittFreelance Writer

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