It’s been ten years since Laika Studios released Travis Knight’s first film under their banner as director, the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings. In the interim, they’ve released the mostly forgotten Missing Link while Knight has directed two big intellectually driven properties, the positively received Bumblebee and, earlier this year, the critical and commercial failure Masters of the Universe. The last five years have been spent on the production of another instant masterpiece, a dark fairy tale that cribs from Rapunzel, The Birds, Labyrinth, and other dark children’s fantasies of yesteryear, ultimately crafting one of the best films of 2026 in Wildwood.
Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is the too-mature-for-her-age, espresso drinking teenage daughter of two Portland hipsters. Despite being forbidden from taking her baby brother Mac out of the house while their parents attend a craft festival, she takes the boy on a tour of the city, getting Voodoo Doughnuts and dealing with unicycling bagpipers. She even bikes past the Legionnaire’s Lament bookstore, a nod to the source novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, who contributed some songs to the film’s soundtrack. Unable to ditch a more juvenile and naive schoolmate, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), Prue takes Mac to a playground, where the baby is abducted by a countless number of crows who fly the baby directly into the same impassable forest that her father has warned her about for her entire life. The kids follow, finding themselves in a magical world where they encounter coyote soldiers in service of a “dowager governess” and are forced to split up. Curtis is taken to the governess (Carey Mulligan), who enlists him in her service because when she looks at him, all she can see is her deceased son, Aleksi. Prue, elsewhere, eventually finds her way to the community of South Wood, where she runs afoul of the current governor and his sniveling assistant before being rescued by the leader of the Avian Principality, Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), and his general (Angela Bassett).
The narrative here is quite dense. The film clocks in at over two hours and is half an hour longer than Kubo, which was already pretty complex. Although the inciting incident bears more than a passing resemblance to Labyrinth, given that it’s a “girl goes into a bizarre fantasy world to save her infant brother” plot, that’s ultimately only a small part of this sprawling story. There are many, many ideas from the wider fairy tale canon: the mechanical recreation of life, a Robin Hood figure, a fertility deal made with a witch, a world covered in magical, possibly malicious kudzu. It also whips out new ideas all of its own, but what really makes this one sing is just how much of a technical marvel the film is. The magical origami creations in Kubo were already masterful, but in Wildwood we witness fusing ivy vines growing like mystical beanstalks, hundreds of birds in flight at once, and dozens of other images that are sheer magic in their scale and imagination before one even considers the intensive labor that went into bringing them to stop-motion life.
Wildwood is already struggling in theaters, which is unfortunate. Laika, one hopes, will continue to provide funding for works like this even if the return on investment continues to fall in the red. In a film year where most of the animation slate is taken up with intellectual property in various stages of descent into slop (Toy Story 5, Minions and Monsters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Angry Birds 3, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and more, if you can believe it), this film’s PG-13 rating is probably hurting its chances with a younger audience. Of course, it’s also not for those audiences, despite what the child-friendly trailers that played before it (for The Cat in the Hat and Cocomelon: The Movie, among others) might have you believe. I attended a midday Sunday screening and I only noticed one kid in the audience of what is already one of my multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and to be quite frank, I found myself worrying about what that stranger’s child might be experiencing. I always have been and forever shall be a proponent of films for children that are frightening; I’ve seen the kind of adults that kids who never experience fear in a safe, manageable environment grow up to be, and their lives are not enviable. Maybe today’s youth are being exposed to worse things online generally, but without the safety net of “it was all a story” that Are You Afraid of the Dark? had or the overall goofiness of Goosebumps to undermine any long-term trauma, they’re not getting the chance to experience terror and then see how it’s not really that scary after all. Make no mistake: Wildwood is decidedly too dark for a child under the age of eleven or so, and its rating is well deserved. The problem, then, becomes the fact that its more reasonable demographic of teenagers will dismiss it because it’s animated and gets looped in with the Cocomelons and the PAW Patrols. That makes for something that’s hard to market.
As such, the film is already being pulled from some markets, and that’s a shame. This is a sprawling, expansive, beautiful movie, and one that you truly should treat yourself to seeing in a theater. It won’t be the end of the world if you see this once it comes to home video and/or streaming, but it won’t be the same. See this one on the big screen if you can, while you can.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
