HHere’s a gripping family film from Portland-based studio Laika, which created Coraline. This is a fantastic adventure in Laika’s typically crafted stop-motion animation, written by Chris Butler based on the best-selling book of the same title by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy, the latter a member of the band The Decemberists, one of whose tour posters we duly glimpse in this film. The director is Travis Knight, the main animator of Laika. It’s a frank, rambunctious, good-natured, old-fashioned children’s tale that CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien might have recognized, a story about the mysterious glory of setting out on a quest and the terrible fear and wish-fulfillment euphoria of being called to confront secret forces of which adults know nothing.
The setting is modern-day Portland, Oregon, a groovy city whose hip stores (there’s a coffee shop actually called Dripster) and Woke 1.0 signage are affectionately mocked. But above all, the film evokes a huge forest park next to the city, a place here mythologized as an impassable wilderness or “wild wood” where strange creatures live, a fairy-tale nobility and talking and eccentric animals, of which city-dwelling humans are totally ignorant. Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a 12-year-old girl whose parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are a couple of kind hippies who believe in natural forces and benign magic. They have another child, Mac, Prue’s little brother, who Prue must take care of one day, pushing him in his stroller around town and having to endure having a certain classmate accompany them. It’s about the nerdy Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) who has a crush on her.
They are stunned when a flock (or rather murder) of crows gather with Hitchcockian menace in a children’s playground, swoop down and carry off poor little Mac into their forest domain. Brave (and equally terrified), Prue and Curtis give chase and enter the dark, trackless forest, only to discover that it is a parallel world, unimaginable to the ordinary human world, populated by all manner of chattering beasts and oppressed humans. Their reign is shared between the haughty and incompetent governor (Marc Evan Jackson) and the evil dowager governess, voiced with relish by Carey Mulligan, who has an army of coyotes in red tunics at her command.
The dowager governess has a heartbreaking sadness in her heart, due to a terrible loss and a tragic attempt at concealment, which the film shows us in the first part. Prue and Curtis, although separated by the action, must come together for their big showdown with that wicked witch of the forest and to also reckon with Wildwood’s bandit leader and freedom fighter, Brendan, voiced by Mahershala Ali.
The stop-motion animation style has, as with Coraline, a robust and enjoyable directness, and results, for me, in a more organic character and physical immediacy than Pixar’s omnipresent digital look, to which it makes a welcome change. I wasn’t sure that the narrative provided a clear and satisfying motive for the governess’s nefarious plan, and in fact the story itself lacked the frightening punch of Coraline, except in the strange opening sequence. Then again, it’s not that kind of story.
Gn entert
