Wildwood Review: LAIKA Won Me Over at the Cinema

01 The story

Wildwood follows Prue McKeel, whose baby brother is carried away by a flock of crows. She heads into a mysterious forest with her classmate Curtis to find him, and discovers a whole world beyond the one she knows.

That’s about as much of the plot as I’d want to give away. The forest and the characters they meet are a big part of the film’s appeal, and I’d rather people experience that for themselves.

02 What impressed me most

I knew LAIKA made stop-motion films, but there’s knowing that and then there’s sitting in a cinema watching something like Wildwood. The amount of detail is staggering. The forest has so much going on, and the characters and settings have that lovely, physical quality you don’t always get with animation.

What really got me was thinking about how it was made. None of this just happens. Every movement takes time, so much of the world has to be built by hand, and every little detail has been thought about by somebody. When you look at the scale of the film, it’s hard to get your head around how much patience and skill that must take.

I found that genuinely inspiring. I wasn’t just enjoying what I was watching; I was admiring the people who’d spent years bringing it to life. That’s not something I feel after every film.

I’m glad I saw it on a cinema screen, too. There’s so much to take in visually that I think it deserves that space. For me, the animation alone made the trip worth it.

03 Where it lost me a little

The story is the one thing that held Wildwood back for me. I enjoyed following the adventure, but I could see quite a lot of it coming. Some of the bigger moments felt obvious before they happened.

I don’t need every film to catch me out with twists. Sometimes a straightforward story works perfectly well. But when the world on screen is this imaginative, it’s a shame that the plot doesn’t have quite the same sense of surprise.

It didn’t ruin the film, and I never felt that the predictable bits cancelled out everything else. I just wanted the writing to take a few more chances. That’s the difference between a film I really liked and one I might have rated even higher.

04 My verdict

What I’ll remember about Wildwood isn’t whether I guessed what was going to happen next. It’s how impressive it was to watch, and how much it made me appreciate the work behind stop-motion animation.

I don’t want to leave it so long before seeing another LAIKA film at the cinema. They’ve won a fan, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever they make next.

My rating is 8.8/10. It’s an excellent cinema experience with astonishing animation. If the story had been a little less predictable, I’d have scored it higher.