Laika’s “Wildwood” runs 132 minutes, making it the longest stop-motion feature ever made. The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “staggering achievement”; IndieWire finds it stunning and sincere, but “the first of their movies that doesn’t feel as special as it looks”. It opens October 23.
Critics have started to weigh in on Wildwood, the latest film from the stop-motion studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings). It opens in cinemas on Friday, October 23.
The Film
- Director: Travis Knight
- Screenwriter: Chris Butler
- Based on: Colin Meloy’s 2011 novel, illustrated by Carson Ellis
- Length: 132 minutes; rated PG-13
- Voices: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day and others
The story follows Prue (Lee), a teenager near Portland, Oregon, whose baby brother is carried off by a murder of crows into the Impassible Wilderness, a kingdom of talking animals. She goes after him with her friend Curtis (Tremblay).
The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Stupendous in Every Respect’
Its review calls the film a “breathtaking fantasy adventure” and a “staggering achievement” that “manages to be enthralling from first moment to last”. It says the opening abduction scene is as frightening as anything in Hitchcock’s The Birds, and that the PG-13 rating is deserved.
IndieWire: Stunning, But Not Laika’s Best
IndieWire’s review calls it “the longest and most ambitious movie of its kind ever made” and “a mad feat of muchness”, but concludes it is “the first of their movies that doesn’t feel as special as it looks”. It still says the film shows “why Laika should be treated like a national treasure”.
How It Was Made
According to IndieWire, Laika:
- 3D-printed 142,000 different face models
- hand-molded 728 individual trees
- used more than 715 miles of brass wire
- worked across 1,155 days of production
- built a miniature replica of Powell’s City of Books to stand in for Portland
The Money Question
IndieWire noted that, with one exception, each Laika film has cost more and earned less than the one before it. The studio is owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, whose son runs it.
Image: Wildwood director Travis Knight at San Diego Comic-Con, July 2018 (file photo). Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
