[music: bespoke “Yakety Sax” cover, but largo]

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: My son and I don’t see animated features in theaters nearly as often as we did when he was younger, but we keep an eye out. We miss the days when every new Disney and Pixar release was an immediate must-see. So far this year we’ve only been lured to the big screen for the mixed-messaging antics of Toy Story 5 and the winning meta-hybrid Coyote vs. Acme. Rest assured we won’t be adding this weekend’s new Cat in the Hat to our dance card, which looks like a garish ADHD collection of studio execs’ worst guesses at what sheltered preschoolers might think is “cool” — e.g., loud noises, flashing lights, goofy dances, plush toys, the multiverse, etc.

Stepping into animation’s quality vacuum are the dedicated artists at Laika Studios, who arose from the ashes of Will Vinton Studios (yep, the California Raisins ad-makers) to dominate the ever-shrinking world of stop-motion animation. Last time we saw Laika writ large, I was in awe of 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings for its “expansive panoramas, intricate settings, and dynamic fight sequences — some in midair, some on the animated seas — [which] would be a mighty feat if they were 100% CG. While computers added details around the edges, it’s staggering to contemplate how much of the film was painstakingly handcrafted in miniature and tediously yet lovingly shot frame-by-frame over the course of years. It’s a wonder the animators had the mental stamina to pursue this undertaking without cracking under pressure and setting things on fire.”

I wasn’t convinced at first by the trailers for their last film, 2019’s Missing Link, which felt like Aardman discards, but it won me over later when I caught it for my Oscars Quest. We didn’t repeat that mistake for their sixth and latest, the ambitious urban-fantasy epic Wildwood. Yet another collaboration between director Travis Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler (arguably faring better here than they did with Masters of the Universe), it’s another staggering, handcrafted achievement that deserves to have its vistas witnessed on the largest possible entertainment machines.

The Gist: Based on the first novel in a trilogy by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis (The Mysterious Benedict Society), Wildwood stars young Peyton Elizabeth Lee (Disney’s Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.) as a teen named Prue whose family lives in a fantasia where no other animators have ever dared to tread: the wild world of Portland, Oregon! For some viewers that’s an exotic setting in itself, replete with a plethora of hippies (the film uses the word more than once), trees, piercings, bicycle lanes, indie coffee shops, and affectionately specific nods to the state where the film was made (e.g., a shot of the real-life Powell’s City of Books, whose marquee advertises their Drag Queen Storytime), many of which missed me because I’ve not yet been farther west than Yellowstone. I won’t pretend that watching a few episodes of Portlandia counts.

Prue lives with her parents (Mr. & Mrs. Smith‘s Maya Erskine and Spider-Verse resident Jake Johnson) and her baby brother Mac (with cries and burbles by Knight’s son Arthur). Mom and Dad are adamant about one rule and will not be taking any questions: Mac is never, ever, ever allowed to go outside, not even with supervision, for pretty much his entire life and will be homeschooled and hypothetically turn out just as fine as anyone else in Portland. Presumably they buy Vitamin D chewables in bulk and plan to get him addicted to screens ASAP for the sake of a vicarious upbringing that’ll leave him just as neurotic and radicalized as the rest of us.

Viewers are given only a few minutes to place their bets as to how many milliseconds it’ll be till Prue confidently takes Mac outside and totally promises to keep him safe and wonders to herself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” At first the answer appears to be “unwanted attention from a boy”: Jacob Tremblay (Room, Life of Chuck) voices a geeky schoolmate named Curtis, the sort of klutzy, four-eyed “nice guy” who keeps his head floating high in the clouds of heroic pop-culture realms and tends to overshare, misread social cues, and overestimate the charm of semantic pedantry. (I can relate.)

As we’re cringing at the junior-high hi-jinks, they’re gravely overshadowed when a creepy murder of crows stages a Hitchcock homage at the playground, nabs poor Mac and flies away with him to their not-so-faraway territory. On this alternate Earth, Portland is next door to the mysterious terrain they call [Gandalfish whispery pause] The Impassable Wilderness! Not to be confused with the Forbidden Forest, Mirkwood, the respective Haunted Forests of Oz and Westeros, or the Fire Swamp between Florin and Guilder.

The flock reports directly to their harsh mistress, the Dowager Governess Alexandria (frequent Academy Award Nominee Carey Mulligan), who desires a tiny boy for certain purposes driven by a tragedy in her past and a scheme in her near-future. Naturally one does not simply walk into The Impassable Wilderness; nevertheless Prue persists, and with Curtis in tow. He’s understandably frightened and nowhere near ready to face real-life conflict…or hey, maybe he can defeat the bad guys and save the day and impress her and then she’ll want to be his girlfriend and even stop rolling her eyes at him! Somehow!

All that’s just the world leading up to Wildwood‘s foreboding border. Beyond mortal safety and beneath that daunting canopy with its disquieting komorebi, Knight introduces multiple factions gradually for our careful scorecarding and, like the Fallout games, for a while it’s unclear which among them, if any, are the “good guys”. Some are human, some have magic powers, some are talking animals, and very few could be called “cute”.

The familiar faces: The guerilla-rebel Bandits faction, led by Academy Award Winner Mahershala Ali, also includes Amandla Stenberg (Sleepy Hollow, Star Wars: The Acolyte), Olafur Darri Olafsson (Severance‘s strongest baddie), and the easily recognizable Awkwafina as an adorably scuzzy rat who oughta be the Great Gonzo’s next sidekick. All the birds who aren’t crows have their own union called the Avian Principality, whose distinguished membership includes Academy Award Nominees Angela Bassett and Richard E. Grant, plus prolific voice actress Colleen O’Shaughnessey, who’s done everything from old Sailor Moon dubs to the recent Sonic movies.

Alexandria’s underlings includes Tom Waits (I just saw him in Wild Horse Nine!), It’s Always Sunny‘s Charlie Day, and the great Blythe Danner (I last saw her in Hearts Beat Loud). Tantoo Cardinal (Dances with Wolves Killers of the Flower Moon) leads the druid faction, far from Stonehenge.

Ostensible overseers of the land’s more mundane aspects include Marc Evan Jackson (Trevor from Parks & Rec!) and his puppet master Jemaine Clement (most recently in the Moana remake, which I skipped, and the third Avatar). Wildwood also employs civil servants such as Rob Delaney (Deadpool 2) and Blue Bloods‘ Len Cariou, a.k.a. Broadway’s original Sweeney Todd.

The Impressions: From a story-structural standpoint, Wildwood is a comfy patchwork of familiar elements from other fantasy universes, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, depending on the excellence in execution. Whenever I got too complacent and began taking the visuals for granted, I’d pause and remind myself, “This is all stop-motion,” and then I’d go back to being awestruck. The crows and selective additive elements are digital effects, but this was chiefly modeled, posed and shot one frame at a time over the course of a four-year production that, at two hours and ten minutes, adds up to the longest stop-motion film in animation history.

And what a beauty it is, featuring the prettiest deciduous scenery in animation since The Wild Robot, such impossibly extended tracking-shot lengths, nuanced character expressions and “physical” “acting”, and standout set pieces — the whirlwind abduction chase; the vertiginous escape from a series of cages suspended from a stories-high dungeon ceiling; various moments of high-speed flights and races through their panoramic dioramas; and a great big satisfying knock-down drag-out Return of the King Final Battle that buries any number of weightless, tediously CGI battlefields at the ends of your standard live-action blockbusters.

Wildwood has still more going on inside those visuals. Topics of discussion:

• The sometimes destructive power of grief
• The unhelpfulness of withholding important family secrets
• The restoration of shattered trust
• The wisdom to know when you’re overwhelmed versus when you just need to take a moment before getting back down to business
• How mass media make big battlin’ heroics — and in particular killing an opponent before they kill you — look far too easy
• How to take great responsibility even when you don’t have great power, unless all that foreshadowing pays off and oh wait maybe you do
• How eagles who take an active role in current political events are much nobler and less irritating than eagles who just show up to scratch their deus ex machina

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…and so on. It’s not for wee tykes — wartime gets harsh, matters get grim, and no one’s safety is guaranteed. not even the baby’s. Animation aficionados should definitely make arrangements to catch it in cinemas while they still can, but for any parent who was hoping it’d make an awesome backdrop for a kindergartener’s birthday party, maybe the Cat in the Hat and his slap-dancing Things are the clowns you’re looking for.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Wildwood end credits, though those who stick around are treated to a new Decemberists song for the occasion called “The Better Part of Bravery” and a quick time-lapse stop-motion making-of demo with a human craftsman visible for size comparison, same as Laika’s done in past end credits.

Entities in the Special Thanks section include Portland’s legendary Voodoo Doughnut, who are awesome. My wife and I visited their Austin location last summer and give it two enthusiastic thumbs-up.