Wildwood Is Handmade Magic With Teeth
On paper, Wildwood sounds like a bedtime story: a girl, an enchanted forest, a rescue mission. On screen, it’s bigger, braver and far more dangerous than any bedtime story has a right to be.
This is animation with real stakes and a real pulse, the rare kind that thrills the kids and quietly rearranges the adults. Every frame was hand-moved, and every frame earns its keep.
Laika, the studio behind making Coraline back in 2009, returns with Travis Knight directing, working from Colin Meloy’s novel. Yes, the Decemberists‘ Colin Meloy, because apparently being in a band wasn’t keeping him busy enough. Prue McKeel is convinced she’s too old for fairy tales, which is exactly the sort of thing a fairy tale loves to hear.
When her baby brother is carried off into the forest beyond the city limits by a murder of crows, she goes after him with her classmate Curtis in tow. That’s the setup, and it’s all you need. The rest deserves to be discovered in a cinema seat with your phone off.
What’s surprising is how much is going on under the adventure.
Wildwood is a complex story that never talks down to its audience, and it keeps circling the same question: what do we hold on to, and what do we have to let go of? It doesn’t answer neatly, and it doesn’t pretend the two are opposites. Plenty of films gesture at “deep themes” the way a person gestures at a gym they’ve paid for. This one actually does the work. The ideas grow out of the characters instead of being announced by them, which is rarer than it should be, and the film trusts you to keep up.
Like Coraline before it, the film plays the ordinary world and the fantasy world against each other, and that is where it’s at its smartest. The poster promises “From the hands that made Coraline,” and for once the marketing isn’t exaggerating. Both films are built by hand, one frame at a time, and the shared craft shows in the same tactile warmth and the same instinct for where real-world feeling meets the strange.
Prue’s family relationships aren’t a quick prologue to get out of the way. They’re the emotional foundation the whole forest is built on, and the wild world keeps echoing what’s going on at home. Laika has always understood that magic means more when it’s tethered to something real, and here the tether is pulled tight.
Fantasy is never just an escape. It’s a mirror with better lighting.
The lighting really is better. Every frame looks like someone spent a week on it, because someone did. The textures, the layered forest, the sense of scale and the handmade quality that no render farm can fake all make Wildwood a wonder to look at. Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography gives it a depth and warmth that make the forest feel lived-in and dangerous at once, and Dario Marianelli’s score does its share of the emotional lifting. Stop-motion lets you feel the hands behind the film. That used to be a limitation, and here it’s the whole point.
The action scenes are a genuine highlight. The chases, confrontations and close calls through the forest are staged with real clarity and momentum, and stop-motion gives them a physical weight that pixels can’t fake. Every leap, swoop and scramble feels like it was built, lit and nudged into place frame by frame, because it was. With talking animals, roguish bandits and powerful figures with questionable intentions all in the mix, there’s no shortage of danger, and the film always knows who is chasing whom and why it matters.
Here the action isn’t a break from the story. It’s the story running at full speed.
That crowded forest could have turned into chaos, but the film juggles it without losing track of who matters. The voice cast is a guest list nobody dared trim. Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay anchor the leads, with Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Charlie Day, Tom Waits and more filling out the ensemble. That could have been a game of spot-the-celebrity.
Instead, the performances serve the characters, and the characterisation is the film’s quiet strength. Nobody is just a type, and even the minor players get a flicker of personality. Prue and Curtis make a great odd-couple pairing, and the film lets their relationship develop instead of rushing it.
This is also a rare animated film that treats a mixed audience as a good thing. Kids will get the thrills, the humour and the wonder. Adults will get the ache. It’s mature without being grim, and emotional without wallowing. Next to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, it’s another sign that stop-motion has become the place where animated films quietly grow up, and it manages that while still being a proper crowd-pleaser. It’s the sort of film that gets you through the credits and then quietly follows you out to the car park.
And then there’s the line. In one quiet dialogue scene, the film tells us that even if you stopped believing in the magic, the magic never stopped believing in you. On paper, that could be stitched onto a cushion. On screen, after everything the film has put Prue through, it lands with real weight. It’s a lovely, disarming idea, and the sort of line people will be repeating long after the credits. Pack tissues, or at least a convincing excuse about forest pollen.
Wildwood is brilliantly directed, gorgeously made and emotionally smart, with a touch of magic, a dash of mystery and a surprising amount of heart. It sits proudly beside Coraline without trying to copy it, which is the best compliment a follow-up can get.
This is a film that deserves the biggest screen you can find. Go see it properly, in the dark, with a crowd, and let the magic do what it’s apparently been doing all along.
Showing in cinemas from Friday, 23 October 2026.
-Dirk Lombard Fourie