Despite all the enthusiastic praise beforehand, I vastly underestimated “Wildwood”. This started on the way to the press screening, when I naively assumed that such a complex stop-motion adventure, in which every single second requires a gigantic amount of effort, wouldn’t be longer than 90 or 100 minutes. In fact, there are 132. There was also a competition from the rental company on site to predict the active days of filming for the latest project from the “ParaNorman” studio LAIKA. Now the choice of question already suggests that there are probably more than you think – so I simply doubled my “honest” estimate and set it to 720. But puff cake! Even with that, I was still far behind the true number, which is closer to 1,150 days of shooting.
A good two hours later, however, I no longer had the question of why it all took so long. Instead, people just puzzled in amazement: How the hell did studio founder Travis Knight, who has already been nominated for the animation Oscar three times, and his team even manage to do that? “Wildwood” is so much more ambitious and massive than anything that has ever been seen in the stop-motion genre that it can only really be compared to Peter Jackson’s megalomaniacal crazy idea to shoot all three “Lord of the Rings” films at the same time. Because “Wildwood” is not tailored to a very young audience due to its fantasy battles, it will not have an easy time at the box office. It would be a crime against the cinema itself if this hand-made masterpiece did not find its audience.
Prue would do anything to save her little baby brother – but an eagle trip like this is also just fun!
Her parents have repeatedly warned Prue (voice: Peyton Elizabeth Lee) not to go outside with her little brother Mac. But Prue doesn’t see why the baby should always just rot in the apartment. So she takes Mac to the playground, where he is promptly kidnapped by a huge flock of crows and dragged off to a nearby forest area.
Together with her nerdy role-playing fan classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), Prue chases after her brother – and ends up in a magical world where people, birds and bandits are enemies. The greatest danger is something completely different: Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), who has gone crazy after the death of her son, not only commands an army of hyenas in addition to the flock of crows, but also wants to sacrifice Mac in order to finally plunge the entire empire into darkness…
Film on, mouths open
You can’t help but be amazed right from the start! Travis Knight, who as the son of Nike founder Phil Knight will never go hungry anyway, has clearly spared no expense or effort on his passion project. The sheer number of detailed characters is simply unheard of for a hand-animated film – and then they also cavort in gigantic sets. When it comes to staging action, LAIKA has already set completely new stop-motion standards with “Kubo – The Brave Samurai” – only to go one step further in “Wildwood”. At the latest in the final battle, in which thousands of warriors, bandits, crows and hyenas go into battle – sometimes surprisingly brutal – all mouths in the audience are open. We haven’t seen such spectacular combat on screen since Helm’s Deep.
Of course, CGI is also used. But the majority of them were actually built – by obviously crazy model builders, the kind you would otherwise only find in Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt. Regardless of whether the viewer knows exactly what kind of effort goes into these shots or not, “Wildwood” has a completely different effect than a “merely” computer-animated film ever could. As long as there is such an exuberant passion that goes beyond all boundaries of what makes economic sense, there is no need to worry about AI taking over filmmaking completely.
Block instead of spill: Every figure has to be moved for every picture – and yet “Wildwood” crams almost every shot full of them!
Once you’ve slowly processed the visual ambition, at some point you start to think about whether the fairytale fantasy story is any good. The first appearance of the hyenas is hilarious: While the uniforms refer to the strict and efficient Prussian army, the soldiers ultimately cannot completely defend themselves from their animal nature, which is why they sometimes lick their crotch or mark their own territory with urine. The bureaucratic punchlines during a subsequent trip to the town hall also ignite, as did Asterix and Obelix with their hunt for the iconic A38 pass.
The initial impression that well-known fantasy tropes are simply mixed up again also evaporates – until Prue’s tragic fate hits you with full force, at the latest on the first brotherless visit to her parents. More than 100,000 faces were 3D printed for the puppets used in order to always have exactly the right facial expressions – and this effort goes straight into the hearts of the audience in the form of raw emotions.
Definitely not just any fantasy monotony
In addition, Colin Meloy, the author of the children’s book* published in 2011, is not only the singer of the indie folk rock band The Decemberists, who are now also contributing songs to the film. He also took inspiration for “Wildwood” from the real Forest Park in Portland – which is exactly where the LAIKA studios are based. There may be certain fantasy set pieces in the story, but at the same time it also seems highly specific and tailored to exactly this location. You can feel this even without any prior knowledge – as well as the enormous attention to detail and the unprecedented effort. In this way, the images – even if “just” in the subconscious of the viewer – are charged with a completely different force and intensity.
Conclusion: It’s pure madness that anyone even started a project like “Wildwood” – and it’s pure madness that it was actually completed. But it’s no secret that quite a few of the greatest masterpieces in cinema history had a (healthy) dose of madness involved.