We’ve got two months left in it, but I feel confident in saying Laika’s Wildwood is probably the best animated film of 2026, and if the Oscars give the award to anything else next year they are officially frauds. I’m not just saying that because I’m biased toward the city depicted in the film, which happens to be where it was made AND where I’ve lived my whole life. Its rock-solid Rotten Tomatoes rating is proof enough that dozens of critics who don’t live in the Rose City agree with me. But also, Portland really is as cool as Wildwood makes it look and to prove it, I was able to see this movie in 35mm at an independently-owned theater with almost no commercials before the show, aside from slides promoting local businesses. Can you do that in YOUR city?
Wildwood is the ultimate Laika film, the culmination of everything they’ve learned and built up over their twenty-year existence. It’s the most impressive stop-motion film I’ve ever seen and it has the plot and writing to back up the visuals. To put the comparison in terms of stop-motion things, Coraline is Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out and Wildwood is A Close Shave: everything’s bigger, everything’s better, the stakes are higher and the storytelling is more refined. You haven’t seen anything yet.
Based on Colin Meloy’s novel of the same name, Wildwood’s core perspective comes from Prue McKeel, a thirteen-year-old resident of Portland’s St Johns neighborhood who starts the movie cynical about her baby brother, her hippie parents, her RPG-obsessed classmate who won’t stop hanging around her, and the concept of magic in general. For those residents of the other 49 states (or other countries) who wonder if they’ll be missing any inside jokes during these opening scenes, I can confirm you definitely will. The guy riding the unicycle while playing the bagpipes is a real guy and the loudest reaction from the audience at my screening came when his puppet equivalent rolled past the camera.
Prue has to grow up quickly when, during a visit to an abandoned playground (one her parents never sanctioned), a large black crowd of crows comes flying in out of nowhere and snatches her baby brother away. Prue has no choice but to follow the crows as fast as her bike can propel her, and the journey takes her to the border of the Impassable Wilderness, a place no human has ever been able to enter. However, Prue seems to have no problem letting herself in, and neither does Curtis who was following the whole time.
Prue and Curtis are quickly separated and each have their own adventures in the enchanted forest, which seems whimsical at first but gets darker and more dangerous the deeper they get into it and the more knowledge they gain about the situation they walked into. There are humans in Wildwood, but they live under a strict bureaucracy. There are talking animals, but they’re at war. Topping it all is the Dowager Governess, a bitter witch woman once married to the Governor who lost her son in a tragedy. Refusing to let go, she resorts to dark magic to “rebuild” her son in the form of a clockwork robot, but that doesn’t end well either. The Governess absolutely snaps and devises a long plan that involves an army of well-dressed wolves and Prue’s brother. Throughout it all, our heroes are in over their heads and victory never feels simple.
From the beginning, Wildwood lets you know that its stakes are real. This is no Disney movie where characters appear to die but come back safely. A couple of harsh moments hammer home that no one is safe — there is one in particular that the audience let out a HUGE gasp over, and I really wish I could talk about it here. But after it happens, it does its job — you are now fully engaged in the fate of Prue and Curtis because the movie will not reassure you they both come out okay. It’s how a story is supposed to be told.
Stories of Wildwood getting a PG-13 rating were treated as fabricated rumors by everyone including me until the moment a trailer was released with the MPA sticker clear as day. Yeah, families go to PG-13 live-action superhero films all the time, but the average mom has different, hypocritical standards for animation. Within this movie’s first half-hour I was thinking “this would have been a PG in the 90s; the ratings board today is too soft.” But by the end, my thoughts had changed: “well, there was no getting around that.” Laika aimed for PG-13 ON PURPOSE.
Travis Knight, who directed the film and also owns the company who made it, doesn’t seem to be concerned in interviews over how well the film could do. Clearly, if he’d distribute the film through Fathom instead of a studio with a marketing budget, and refuse to re-edit Wildwood after getting the PG-13, he has different priorities. Producing an uncompromised movie was more important to him than sanding it down to meet the demands of a studio. Of course he also happens to be a nepo baby (a very talented one!) whose father owns Nike, and so it doesn’t seem to matter that Wildwood opened at #3 this weekend after spending $100 million over seven years. Laika is in a very unique position.
I would like it to earn more, though. Trust me, you NEED to see this movie, and you need to see it in a theater. This is the kind of movie you want to support, even if there’s a shoe-gar daddy that will make up the difference. Wildwood deserves millions of fans and a long-tail extended play in cinemas. Tell all your friends and even some people you don’t like that much. This movie’s very existence defies trends in Hollywood that wags claim are inevitable; it is 100% handmade and proud of it. And it is GOOD, GREAT even. It’s a shining, blinding example of what human effort and spirit alone can achieve. The world needs more Wildwoods.
