Wildwood: a ‘surpassingly beautiful’ fantasy adventure

I am not sure if I have ever seen a stop-motion film as “intricate or lavish” as “Wildwood”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, nor if I will again. This “surpassingly beautiful” fantasy adventure – every frame of which was handcrafted with breathtaking artistry – is the latest gem from the American animation studio Laika.

A “beguiling modern day Narnia fable”, adapted from a book by the folk-music star Colin Meloy, it is about two children: the tenacious Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), and her “anxious” classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). They venture outside their home city (hipster-ish, modern-day Portland) into the “impossibly deep and tangled forest” beyond, to rescue her baby brother. He has been spirited there by a murder of crows, working for a wicked duchess (Carey Mulligan) who lives in the forest – a storybook world full of bandits, talking animals and unsettling sights.

A story about the “terrible fear and wish-fulfilment euphoria of being called upon to confront secret forces that the grown-ups know nothing about”, “Wildwood” is an exuberant, old-fashioned tale, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It lacks the scary punch of Laika’s “Coraline” but its stop-motion animation is a very refreshing change from Pixar’s “digital look”.

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I think it’s even better than “Coraline”, said Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. Every scene is extraordinarily realised, from Portland’s hip shops to the battlefield strewn with corpses; and it takes some genius to borrow from Stephen King, J.R.R Tolkien and Alfred Hitchcock, and forge a story that feels this fresh.