It’s been seven years since Laika last had a film hit theaters, and the stop-motion animation studio has clearly spent that time hard at work. Wildwood, its long-awaited return, is a visually immersive, technically brilliant marvel that demonstrates just how much can be accomplished with the medium. Coming off 2019’s Missing Link, a wonderfully silly, family-friendly, abbreviated good time, Laika has returned with something considerably more ambitious, darker, and more violent. The studio has always walked a fine line between movies made for kids and those with enough weight and edge for adults to appreciate, even if parents might want to hold off on showing them to the little ones for a few more years. Coraline, for example, is hardly something I’d recommend to the youngest viewers, but it’s a perfect entry point into horror for a ten-year-old. With Wildwood, that balance is a little more complicated.
Among the studio’s directors, Henry Selick and Travis Knight have perhaps best embodied that blend of childhood wonder and more visceral, adult-oriented themes. Selick tends to approach it through horror, surrealist set pieces, and wonderfully unsettling character designs, while Knight gravitates toward fantasy and stories about family lineage and generational responsibility. That was the case with the gorgeous and expansive Kubo and the Two Strings, and it’s very much the case with Wildwood. As close to a Lord of the Rings-style animated fantasy epic as I can think of, Knight and Laika have certainly bitten off a lot to chew here.
The story follows Prue (wonderfully voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a young girl who ventures into the Impassable Wilderness after her toddler brother is snatched by a massive murder of crows and taken to Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), a warmongering dowager governess with her own designs for the child. Prue’s classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) follows her into this strange land of warring factions and talking animals, where the two attempt to get her brother back. As Prue negotiates with Alexandra and learns more about the wilderness, the film gradually reveals the history between the governess and Prue’s parents, and why her brother was taken in the first place.
The film splits its attention between Prue’s journey and Curtis’s increasingly chaotic misadventures, and I found the latter to be considerably more fun. After entering the wilderness, Curtis is captured, accused of being a bandit, and strung up in a birdcage inside a cave. His subsequent efforts to help his fellow captives escape are among the film’s simplest pleasures, allowing the adventure to unfold through action and character (and a hearty amount of laughs) rather than another lengthy explanation of the world’s history. It’s a reminder that Laika’s stop-motion style can be just as effective when it’s telling a straightforward, entertaining story as when it’s constructing an entire fantasy world from the ground up. Unfortunately, the A-plot leans a little too heavily on exposition for my liking, and while Prue’s journey has moments of genuine heart, it’s often overwhelmed by the film’s need to explain every corner of its sprawling mythology.
That ambition does pay off in some remarkable ways, particularly when the film builds toward its climactic battle. The scale of this sequence is unlike anything I can recall seeing in a stop-motion movie, and the sheer amount of work required to bring it to life is staggering. It also caught me a little off guard just how brutal the film gets. I’ve always thought of Laika’s movies as being challenging for children, but still for the kids, even with enough frightening imagery to make them memorable without losing sight of their intended audience. Wildwood does not fit that mold as neatly. Its PG-13 rating is certainly earned, with animals placed in considerable peril, characters dying with little warning, and the violence of its larger set pieces becoming downright relentless. If Coraline manages to bridge the gap between children and adults through its horror elements, Wildwood does so through the sheer force of its violence and the scale of its destruction.
And yet, for all its technical brilliance, I was left wanting more from the story itself. Wildwood borrows heavily from the high-fantasy tradition of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and other sprawling, tentpole adventures, but those stories tend to have a stronger sense of specificity, with characters and histories that give their increasingly grand plot developments some emotional staying power. By comparison, Wildwood feels like a film trying to squeeze an entire fantasy saga into a little over two hours. There simply isn’t enough room to fully develop its world, flesh out its characters, and establish the backstories necessary to make every revelation or death hit with the intended force. Too often, the story moves past moments that should carry real weight, leaving them to land with a soft thud rather than the emotional punch they’re clearly aiming for.
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Still, there’s plenty here for audiences willing to get swept up in the adventure, and the visual feats alone make Wildwood worth seeing on the big screen. At a time when corners are being cut across the filmmaking industry, the handcrafted labor and tender care evident in every frame feel especially worthwhile. Laika’s commitment to stop-motion animation remains something to celebrate, and I hope the studio continues to tell the kind of singular, idiosyncratic stories that made its best films so special: children battling button-eyed pseudo-mothers, or setting off to find Bigfoot-like creatures in strange corners of the world. Wildwood has the spectacle, the craft, and the ambition, but it lacks some of that specificity that makes those earlier films stick with you. It’s an impressive achievement, just not quite the great fantasy epic it wants to be.
Score: 6/10
Wildwood (2026)
- Voice Cast: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant
- Director: Travis Knight
- Genre: Adventure, Animation
- Runtime: 140 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: October 23, 2026
- Movies Like Wildwood: Hoppers, Flow, Isle of Dogs
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