REVIEW

‘WILDWOOD’ an Astounding Work of Craft Whose Story Can’t Quite Keep Pace

Name: Wildwood review
Item: Wildwood
Rating: 3.7
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · October 28, 2026

‘WILDWOOD’ an Astounding Work of Craft Whose Story Can’t Quite Keep Pace

Where to watch: In theaters now (updated October 2026)Find showtimes

Wildwood is a difficult proposition. A two-plus-hour, PG-13, rarely comedic stop-motion fable steeped in graphic violence and heavy, adult-oriented themes, it’s sadly no surprise that it underperformed at the box office. Movies that smuggle grown-up darkness into a medium audiences associate with kids have rarely been rewarded for it, and Wildwood, Oregon-based Laika’s sixth feature, unfortunately follows that pattern. Directed by Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) from a script by Chris Butler (ParaNorman), and adapted from the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, it nevertheless represents a high-water mark for the art of stop motion, even when its storytelling bona fides struggle to keep pace.

The animation pushes well past anything Laika has done before, setting a new standard for the too-rarely-used art form. Every nook and cranny of this world is stuffed to the point of bursting. The film opens in a stop-motion Portland that ripples with place-specific detail: Powell’s Books, the monorail, the homeless guys. The amount of handcrafted, individually manipulated craft poured into something as small as a character’s bedroom is staggering, and when we finally cross into the magical realm of Wildwood, that technical brilliance only expands, pulling back to reveal a piece of genuine visual majesty.

Not everything is quite so magical, though, starting with who this movie is actually for. Wildwood opens in shocking fashion. A boy of royal stripes strips naked and forlornly mounts the ledge of his tower. His mother, the Dowager Governess Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan), catches his weeping eyes and knows his intention. He rips a mechanical heart from his chest, Temple of Doom style, and plummets to the ground below. Launching what most would assume is a children’s movie with a child suicide is, well, certainly a choice, and one that quickly certifies this may not be the best theatrical outing for kids who could leave with questions about killing yourself. The rest of the film isn’t quite as grim, but a specter of darkness (and plenty of tears) haunts it throughout.

[READ MORE: Every LAIKA Movie, Ranked]

After that prelude, we meet Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a girl who’s done being a kid and wants to do adult things like drink coffee and ignore her parents’ instructions. Asked to babysit her little brother, Mac, and told not to leave the house under any circumstances, Prue promptly dismisses her parental brief and absconds into the city on her bike. There she runs into Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), a classmate who leans more toward the D&D side of the spectrum than the cool kids’ table, and then the unspeakable happens: her baby brother is snatched by a murder of crows and carried into the Impassable Wilderness that lies just across the tracks from Portland.

Prue and Curtis give chase and find themselves entangled in a bewitched world of anthropomorphic woodland creatures, black-magic sages, wise old trees, and every other kind of enchantment, where their outsider status marks them as suspicious and unwanted. A war between good and evil is brewing, and Prue is soon torn between forces far greater than her, willing to go to the end of the world and back to rescue her brother.

At 130 minutes, though, Wildwood is as dense as the walls of ivy that keep outsiders out. The same maximalist impulse that makes every frame a marvel also bloats the story, and there simply isn’t enough narrative meat to justify the runtime. Stretches aren’t boring exactly, but they sap the film’s propulsion and could easily have been trimmed. Knight seems allergic to killing his darlings, packing in as much detail and as many side characters as he can fit.

And there are a lot of them. There’s Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), one of the bird kingdom’s royals willing to help Prue; Dmitri (Charlie Day), a turncoat from the Coyote militia; Septima (Awkwafina), a helpful rat; the General (Angela Bassett), a massive eagle who leads the non-crow birds; and Brendan (Mahershala Ali), a bandit leader with his own claim to the kingdom the villainous Dowager Governess plans to conquer. It’s a voice cast that punches in the weight class of studios with far more cash to burn, yet almost nobody gets enough room to matter. Most of them register as colorful pieces on a crowded board rather than characters we’re invested in.

That’s ultimately what keeps Wildwood from soaring. It asks big questions, chiefly how to carry on in the shadow of grief without letting it twist you into something monstrous, but it never arrives at anything new to say about them. It’s the same problem that made Butler’s ParaNorman my least favorite Laika outing: an emotional story that never quite connects. These characters cry a lot (they’re always crying), but I never did. The battles are exceptionally staged and surprisingly graphic for an animated feature, yet because we barely know the people fighting them, the stakes never fully land.

Still, the animation is so breathtaking, and so many of its shots left me wondering how on earth they pulled them off, that its narrative shortcomings feel like minor complaints against the sheer largesse of the accomplishment. Knight’s creation is a living, moving tapestry to the wonder of stop-motion animation and likely one of the most epically scaled examples of the form we’ll ever see on the big screen. If only its heart beat as loudly as its craft.

CONCLUSION: A living, breathing tapestry of handcrafted wonder, ‘Wildwood’ is Laika’s most staggering technical achievement yet, even if Travis Knight’s overstuffed dark fable can’t match its visual majesty with emotional might.