Wildwood review – Laika’s pleasingly old fashioned stop-motion magic-forest odyssey

Here is an engaging family movie from the Portland-based Laika studio that created Coraline. It is a fantasy adventure in Laika’s distinctively crafted stop-motion animation, written by Chris Butler from the bestseller of the same title by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy, the latter being a band member of The Decemberists, one of whose tour posters we duly glimpse in this film. The director is Laika’s lead animator Travis Knight. It’s a forthright, exuberant, good-natured and old-fashioned children’s tale which CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien might have recognised, a story about the mysterious glory of going on a quest and the terrible fear and wish-fulfilment euphoria of being called upon to confront secret forces that the grownups know nothing about.

The setting is modern-day Portland, Oregon, a groovy city whose hipster-ish stores (there’s a coffee shop actually called Dripster) and Woke 1.0 signage are affectionately mocked. But most of all, the film is aware of a huge forest park next to the city, a place here mythologised as the impassable wilderness or “wildwood” where strange creatures, fairytale nobility and wisecracking talking animals reputedly dwell, of which the city-dwelling humans are entirely ignorant. Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a 12-year-old girl whose parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are a couple of amiable hippies who believe in natural forces and benign magic. They have another child, Prue’s baby brother Mac, who Prue has to look after one day, pushing him in his stroller around the city and having to endure a certain classmate of hers tagging along. This is nerdy Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) who has a crush on her.

They are stunned when a bunch (or rather a murder) of crows gather with Hitchcockian menace in a kids’ play area, swoop down and carry poor little Mac off to their forest domain. Plucky (and also terrified) Prue and Curtis give chase and enter the dark and trackless forest, and find it is a parallel world, undreamt of by the ordinary human world, populated by all manner of loquacious beasts and oppressed humans. Their rule is divided between the supercilious and incompetent governor (Marc Evan Jackson) and the evil dowager governess, voiced with relish by Carey Mulligan, who has at her command a redcoat army of coyotes.

The dowager governess has a wrenching sadness in her heart, due to an awful loss and a tragic attempt at a cover-up, which the film shows us in the opening section. Prue and Curtis, though separated by the action, are to come together for their big showdown with this wicked witch of the forest and a reckoning also with the Wildwood’s bandit leader and freedom fighter Brendan, voiced by Mahershala Ali.

The stop-motion animation style has, as with Coraline, a robust and pleasing directness, and results in, for me, a more organic character and physical immediacy than Pixar’s ubiquitous digital look, to which it makes a welcome change. I wasn’t sure that the narrative delivered a satisfyingly clear motive for the governess’s reprehensible plan, and in fact the story itself did not have the scary punch of Coraline, except in the uncanny opening sequence. Then again, it’s not that kind of story.