Laika has always been the studio that chose texture over speed — physical puppets, hand-built sets, tangible light — and Wildwood leans into that identity harder than anything they've made since Coraline. The source material is a bestselling novel by Colin Meloy (of The Decemberists) and illustrator Carson Ellis, which probably explains why the film feels so comfortable with its own folk-fantasy register. Travis Knight, Laika's lead animator making his directorial debut here, treats the forest as a place that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms, not as a CGI spectacle. The setup is clean and quick: Prue, a 12-year-old with hippie parents in modern-day Portland, watches a murder of crows abduct her baby brother Mac and carry him into the impassable wilderness bordering the city. She and her nerdy, crush-bearing classmate Curtis follow. What they find is a parallel society — talking animals, feudal politics, a pompous governor, and a wicked dowager governess — that has no contact with the ordinary human world. The Hitchcockian crow sequence that kicks this off is the film's sharpest moment, genuinely unsettling in the way that early Laika excelled at. Carey Mulligan's governess is the most interesting character in the film, not because she's straightforwardly villainous but because the script gives her a backstory built on grief and a desperate, misguided cover-up. Whether the narrative fully earns the weight it places on that backstory is a fair question — the reviewer finds the motive not entirely satisfying — but the attempt is the right one. Mahershala Ali voices the forest bandit leader Brendan, and the film's climax brings Prue, Curtis, and the governess into reckoning with each other and with the Wildwood's deeper logic. The stop-motion itself is the film's strongest argument for its own existence. The review puts it plainly: there's a 'robust and pleasing directness' and 'organic character and physical immediacy' that distinguishes Laika from Pixar's digital mode. That's not nostalgia talking — it's a genuine formal difference. Stop-motion has weight in ways that rendered imagery often doesn't. Characters feel like they occupy space. When a crow swoops, it displaces air you can almost feel. The affectionate mockery of Portland's hipster culture — a coffee shop called Dripster, Woke 1.0 signage — is the film's wittiest gesture and also its most self-aware. The Decemberists tour poster cameo is a knowing wink to adults who know where this story comes from. These touches don't overwhelm the children's adventure at the centre, which is genuinely old-fashioned in the best sense: a quest structure, separated companions, a confrontation with adult evil, a resolution that costs something. CS Lewis and Tolkien are the right reference points, not ironic ones. Where Wildwood doesn't quite reach is the level of dread that made Coraline so enduring. That film's Other Mother is one of animation's genuinely frightening antagonists. The governess here is sad more than scary, which is a valid creative choice but means the film operates in a different emotional register — warmer, more reassuring, less likely to haunt you. For younger children, that's probably better. For the adults who love Coraline for its darkness, the comparison will work against Wildwood unfairly.
