Wildwood

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I worry that there are sullen teens out there who are like, I'm not gonna watch a kids movie.

Oh, yeah.

I just wanna say to you, hey, sullen teen. Hey, goth at the beach.

This is for you. You're pulling a chair, turning it around. Yep. Glenn's tough talk for teens. Wildwood is 1 of the most ambitious animated features ever made, and I'm just gonna say it.

I think it's 1 of the best movies of the year. It's an epic stop motion saga with raging battles, fantastical animals, and even a detail rich recreation of downtown Portland, Oregon.

Wildwood tells the dark, intense, visually imaginative story about a girl who enters a magic forest after crows steal her baby brother. I'm Glenn Weldon.

And I'm Steven Thompson. Joining us today on NPR's pop culture happy hour is Monica Castillo, film critic for the AV Club. Welcome back, Monica.

So thrilled to be back to talk about this 1.

Just gonna say it right up front. We like this movie. Love

this movie.

So if you're unfamiliar with the studio Leica, it's the stop motion animation studio behind not only Coraline, but also films like Paranorman and Kubo and the 2 Strings. Wildwood tells the story of a girl named Pru who lives in Portland with her protective parents and baby brother. Pru's parents insist that her brother must never go outside, and when she defies them by taking him to a playground, he's carried away by crows who spirit him into the dark and forbidding woods outside Portland. So Proulx ventures in after him joined by a nerdy neighborhood kid voiced by Jacob Trombley. What follows is an intense, sometimes surprisingly violent adventure as Proulx attempts to navigate the forest realm and its world of warriors, magical wildlife, feckless politicians, fearsome bandits, a dowager governess, and because we're not that far from Portland, hippies.

Wildwood was directed by Travis Knight, who did Kubo and the 2 strings with a voice cast that also includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, and Tom Waits. It's in theaters now. Glenn, I'm gonna start with you. What'd you think of Wildwood?

Oh, you nailed it, Steven. Easily 1 of the best movies of

the year because this thing Yeah.

Is a movie. Capital m. Oh, yeah. This is an achievement, and this desperately needs to be seen. My fear is that people are gonna lump this in with the DreamWorks of it all.

You know, they hear all the celebrity, like, voice actors, and they're gonna think, oh, I can skip it. I can wait to stream it, you know, later. Don't wait. This is so gorgeous. It's the last movie I can remember wanting to just crawl inside and live in, which is...

You know, that's down to the visuals. We will talk about the visuals, but also the vibe. This is epic adventure storytelling. It's exciting. You referenced this already, but fair warning, it's dark.

It goes hard. There are stakes. Folks die. There's violence. There's very intense imagery, but, man, it all works.

And there's also plenty of humor, which I like. And I was worried at the beginning, there is a very standard comic relief character that we are introduced to, but the humor in this movie arises out of character and situation organically. It's not quippy 1 liners. It's got pop culture references, which is why it feels timeless. It feels classic.

It feels like a movie I'm gonna be watching every year for the rest

of my life. So you liked it. I liked it. Alright. How about you, Monica?

It does feel... I kinda compared it to, like, the big epic adventures of the 19 eighties, where there was a sense of real kids in danger of an adventure where death is a real thing that could happen, and there's a finality to magically comes back alive, and there's no Right. A get out of jail free card. It's... There are consequences to their actions if they choose the wrong path.

I felt really scared, but I was also really entranced by finding out more about this world. This world is so detailed. It has so many layers. There's so much else going on in addition to the main story, which is already really engrossing as it is. And then there's more.

And then there's all these wonderful characters you get to meet. I can't wait to geek out about the the visual style of it because there were moments where I forgot I was watching a stop motion animated film. It's so smooth. It's so detailed. My brain just kind of assumed, like, yeah, those are trees.

No. No. No. No. Those are hand painted, like, meticulously constructed and done, and individually, the leaves move together as they're rustling in the wind.

And it's beautiful, and it's enchanting. And wow. I just can't say enough good things about this film. I really, really enjoyed it.

Yeah. I'm with y'all. I loved this movie. Not only is it, I think, the best animated film of the year, I think it's 1 of the very best films of the year. And I I hope that when people talk about it, they start to talk about it in those terms as not just like this is good for an animated movie.

What... No. This is just fantastic. You've both kind of alluded to the visuals here. The surfaces in this film.

Unreal.

The surfaces of the birds, the surfaces of the trees. Yes. Monica, you kind of mentioned, like, you forgot you were watching stop motion animation. Right. There are definitely scenes where you're you're watching this and you're like, there's no way this isn't traditional animation.

There's no way they're doing stop motion for this scene. And then you realize, like, no. That's... That is stop motion animation. It's just a huge crowd, and they did it in spectacular detail.

This movie looks like it took 50 years and cost $500,000,000. I mean that as the highest of compliments. And at the same time, it would be so easy and so understandable if they had spent so much time on the look of this film that they had somehow kind of cut corners in the storytelling or made this an overly simple story. They do not. Nope.

This movie, as Glenn said, it goes really, really hard, but there's just... There's wit to it. There's movement to it. It's never it's never stiff. It's never boring.

Never slow. Never slow.

Not at And this is the longest stop motion animation film ever made. It's more than 2 hours long. Yeah. It's all on the screen. It's all on the screen.

And yet, in the closing credits, and this is giving nothing away. In the closing credits, you get that thing where they show you a little bit of the animators making this film, and I realized I could watch another 2 hour movie of them making this movie.

Well, see, that's the thing. I mean, you do find yourself forgetting it's stop motion animation, and then you snap back. It happened to me every few minutes, and... Because you just think the craft, the work, like, the the sheer labor. You get kind of mentally exhausted by proxy just imagining human hands entering the frame and making microscopic movements on these little miniatures and then stepping back.

And the amount of work and the amount of skill here makes me retroactively angry at every mid computer animated kids movie that they have been pawning off on us for years. It's like you're living off of processed meat, and somebody hands you a steak. And Yeah. I ducked out before that... Before the credits there, so I'm glad I did because part of me wants to watch the special features and behind me and stuff because you just sit there goggling.

And I think I know 1 of those moments, Steven, we get flaming cannonballs. And I'm, like, sitting there with my arms crossed going, how did they do the flaming cannonballs? And I live for those moments. Like, a strand of ivy moves in a way that's clearly not digital. It's analog.

It's human. It's real Yeah. Which makes everything around it more intense, makes this world all the more real. Fantastic.

So this is essentially, like, the stop motion animation equivalent of The Odyssey, where everything is just so big. I mean, there are moments where the camera cuts to a wide shot, and you realize, like, oh, this is an entire set that they've built, that they also include the sky and all of this land. And you can see what looks like miles, but it's all, you know, forced perspective. It's just incredible. There's so many little moments like that.

Like, the kids walking into a clearing and having the light streaming through the leaves, and you're like, what? It's just so beautiful to just marvel at.

Yeah. That's a good point. We have got more thoughts about Wildwood after the break.

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Welcome back. I also wanna point out, like, yes, this is a stop motion rendering of these fantastical realms. Right? But there are also scenes that are just set in Portland, Oregon. And those are full.

You know, we... At at least, I know Glenn and I have been to Portland. We've actually been to Portland together. Monica, have you been to Portland? Yeah.

I have. Yes. So I was very happy to see, you know, Powell's books, well represented. Mhmm. Voodoo Doughnuts, little nods to local businesses and and chains that started there.

It's this loving depiction of Portland right down to things like when somebody's pulling a Radio Flyer wagon, it says Malloy Flyer in, like, a little nod to Colin Malloy who, you

know, wrote the book that

this is based on. And, obviously, you know, the Decemberists perform songs on the soundtrack. This is a movie where every detail is thought through, and yet there is still this looseness and this kind of knockabout quality that is just... I found so, so, so appealing. And the

character design, like, it's not just slick computer animated character design. Every character... Well, many characters have bags under their eyes. I love that. I love that.

Even the beautiful, like, doward your governess witch person, she's still tired. We're all tired.

Protagonist is

tired. Movie of our times.

Yeah. And and, like, the design of the dad, the hippie dad, Pru's hippie dad, is so, like, sharply observed. I have met this dude. I I I I have seen this guy's topknot.

And He's in a food co op right now somewhere.

Raiders. And I just worry that there are... About the marketing of this film and who who this film is for. I worry that there are sullen teens out there who are like, I'm not gonna watch a kids movie.

Oh, yeah.

I just wanna say to you, hey, sullen teen. Hey, goth at the beach. This is for you.

You're pulling a chair, turning it around. Glenn, have talk for teens.

Yeah. There are also adults who are gonna dismiss this because it's got a kid protagonist. This movie

is for you. Go see this movie.

It's so much more mature than you might think at 1st glance because it's like kids on an adventure. Great. Seen it.

Mhmm.

And then it deals with very heavy subjects about death and grieving, and how do we process that? How do we talk about these things? It's so smart about the whole thing. Even the villain, the dowager, governess, Alexandra, you know, her whole backstory comes out throughout the journey, and you kind of feel sympathy for her, but it's more complicated because she's also trying to achieve this evil plot. It's so fascinating how they weave all of that together.

This is a film that also understands the awesome destructive power of Ivy. And as someone who lives in the Mid Atlantic region of this country, that's folk.

I got a weird question for you, Steven. I don't know the Decemberists. I don't know Colin Molloy. As I get older, I I find myself channeling Marge Simpson more often. Music is none of my business.

But Mhmm. You know the Decemberists. Obviously, this is an adaptation of Molloy's book, so it's not a direct line. But if you know the guy's music, do you watch this movie and think, yeah, that checks out?

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, certainly, you know, he wrote the story. He wrote the book on which this is based. It's naturally gonna reflect a lot of his sensibilities. If I were to critique the music of the Decemberists or compare the music of The Decemberists to this film, the music of The Decemberists is a little bit twee.

It's very kind of multisyllabic, a lot of, you know, big words. It's often perceived as a little too smart for its own good, and he definitely has a rich vocabulary of $10 words that he likes to work into what he does. This film feels like like an extrapolation from his work, and it feels very much like a collaborative vision. There are some changes to the story, you know, from the book to the movie, and it incorporates Decemberists' songs, but it's not governed by them. The songs, I think, are supporting the film instead of the film being retrofitted to suit the songs.

And so I'm somebody who has always admired the Decemberists. I've sometimes admired them more than I've loved them because I sometimes... I'm not necessarily able to hook in emotionally because they're so wordy and and florid. And to me, like, this is really, like, teasing out what I like the most about what he does.

I will say... I'm interested in the book. In fact, I'm so interested in the book because, again, this movie has... I don't wanna say lore. I wanna say world building.

I mean, yeah, there's, like, a lot of stuff in it as you mentioned, Monica. There's, like, different competing factions. Did we need these scenes with the governor voiced by PCHH favorite Mark Evan Jackson? Probably not from a story perspective, but from a vibe perspective and from a... This makes this world feel more real, definitely.

But I did stop... On my way home from the theater, I stopped by my local bookstore, and I ordered this book because I just love this world.

I also wonder, you know, Steven, you were mentioning that there was differences from the book to the movie. How much on the cutting room floor or what changes they were made? Because this already is incredible. I can't imagine the book has even more details, maybe even more characters that didn't make the cut. So I'm so curious to see how the 2 compare.

Monica, is there anything else you wanna add?

I think 1 of the beautiful things about the fact that it pays tribute to Portland, and I also love that Leica is based there. So it is their hometown. There's a sense of hometown pride in making this story and bringing it to the big screen and giving it this big royal treatment, is that we don't really get to see these sort of regional specific stories as often. Like, you know, it feels like every 3rd movie is set in New York City, which fine, I love. I get.

But there are so many different parts of the country. There are so many different parts of the world, and it's such a treat to see stories from different corners of our own country. And I really love that they retain that sort of local flavor and really made it a part of the story.

Yeah. They made it specific. They made it fantastical. They made it earthbound. They made it beyond earthbound.

I think it's fair to say, we think you should see it.

Absolutely. Definitely. Make time for it.

Oh my gosh.

And see it on the big screen to get involved and enmeshed in that world. Big screen. Absolutely.

That brings us to the end of our show. Monica Castillo, Glenn Weldon, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you. This episode was produced by Hefsa Fathema, Liz Metzger, Caden Mills, and Mike Katsef, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Audio engineering was performed by Travis Hagen, and Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to pop culture happy hour from NPR. I'm Steven Thompson, and we will see you all next time.

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