Wildwood begins with a brisk violation of scale. A murder of crows takes a baby and turns a short trip from home into a journey for which the children have no useful map. Prue has a motive simple enough to carry into almost any corner of the film. Her brother is somewhere she cannot see. Travis Knight and writer Chris Butler adapt Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s book with an understanding of how valuable that simplicity is to a world in which animals talk, boundaries have political meanings and a girl may be asked to take someone’s account of the forest on trust.
The shift into the woods makes a particularly good case for Laika’s craft. A forest can look like a flat image of depth if the detail is all of the same order. Here the material density of the smaller objects gives the bigger forms a scale to exceed. A wing, a fold of clothing and a patch of ground can all seem to offer different degrees of resistance. There is pleasure in the sense that a figure has to occupy the landscape a small distance at a time. It makes the invitation to disappear into a setting feel as physical as it is imaginative.
The traces of Portland are important to this effect. A city at the edge of woods can contain a daily sense of proximity to a landscape children have been told they cannot enter. The film uses that idea more fruitfully than it would use an arbitrary gateway between a generic home and a fantasy realm. Prue has already spent some time living beside the place. The distance between familiar ground and a place with its own rules can be measured in a few steps. That gives the world an intimacy the large creatures and sweeping views can then disturb.
Peyton Elizabeth Lee’s Prue has the useful directness of a child with a family problem too urgent for polite conversation. Jacob Tremblay’s Curtis gives the film a chance to consider what it feels like to be drawn into somebody else’s quest. The distinction matters once the forest has factions and loyalties of its own. Prue has a reason to treat the place as something to get through. Curtis can make discoveries that have a value independent of how quickly they bring him back to Portland. Their divergence is one of the film’s richest devices and asks for more space than the succession of introductions always gives it.
Carey Mulligan’s Alexandra has the conviction of someone who believes the rules of a place can be reorganized around a personal loss. That makes her a useful counterpart to Prue, who has arrived prepared to cross a boundary for a similar reason. The fairy tale has an opportunity to hold the parallel open without making the two people equivalent. Knight gets closer to that difficulty when the film makes grief seem capable of rearranging a landscape. A story that has to steer so many other figures into position sometimes settles for a more readily identifiable source of danger.
Laika’s earlier films have found dread in the amount of care that goes into making an object attractive. Here an animal can have a fascinating surface and still be capable of making a claim on a child that the child has no means of judging. The crows are an especially direct use of that capacity. Their coordinated movement gives a frightening physical shape to a theft with an entirely comprehensible domestic consequence. The forest is less effective when the curiosity its inhabitants provoke simply leads to another explanation of its politics. An odd creature is most useful when it can ask something of Prue that she would never have thought to prepare for.
There is a generosity to the number of corners the film wants to turn. An encounter with a new creature can make its world feel populous in a way few family adventures manage. The same eagerness puts an unusual burden on the sibling rescue. Prue’s attention has to remain pointed at a missing person while the film’s attention keeps finding remarkable reasons to stay elsewhere. When a detour changes her understanding of what she can ask of Curtis, or of what strangers owe her, the movement feels earned. When it establishes one more feature of the map, the maps start to feel like work.
The physical expressiveness also extends to the voices. The ensemble does more than assign an easily recognizable register to each creature. A child can enter an encounter hearing assurance where an older listener would hear the patience of someone who expects to get their way. The film is strongest when the sound of an approach gives the children another piece of evidence to interpret. It is a small form of storytelling the production can continue to practice even when the landscape is doing its most expensive work.
Knight has made a forest whose inhabitants seem to have arranged a great deal of life without waiting for an audience. That is Wildwood’s rarest achievement. The plot could spend longer with a handful of those lives and still leave the impression that several more continue beyond the edge of the frame. Its excess has an understandable source. For all the danger that brought the children there, the film itself has a hard time leaving.
