Yes, the stop motion animation for Wildwood is indeed as impressive as everyone on YouTube and TikTok says! People spent months animating feathers and leaves flapping in the breeze! I spent a good part of the movie trying to figure out how they animated the murders of crows and flocks of birds.
It was unexpectedly funny, too, and not in an over exaggerated or goofy way.
“Did you just dry heave at me?”
(both swims in and eats from a bowl of venison stew) “Did you want some?”
(cringes) “No, thanks. I… stood in some food earlier.”
“I must be dreaming!”
(slaps her) “Does that feel like a dream?”
I was also oddly impressed by the realism of the baby’s voice throughout the movie. It sounds like someone painstakingly recorded a baby making all kinds of baby sounds to edit into the movie. For a while, I also thought the movie’s mascot rat was voiced by Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist, but alas, it was only Awkwafina.
The final battle scene was also very impressive, but it did contain a moment that completely pulled me out of the story, kind of for the rest of the movie. Tougher farmers, bandits, and coyotes fight most of the battle, but the protagonist Prue and her sidekick Curtis also weave in and out of the action. Prue pursues her baby brother, and Curtis helps fight where he can. In the course of his adventure, Curtis has befriended the mascot rat, who dies in the course of the final battle. The rat death scene is for everyone in the audience who has had a pet rat… BUT Prue has absolutely no reason to witness it! It should have been Curtis’ special moment while Prue was off saving her brother! She didn’t even know who the rat was! Somehow amidst all the action and her own goal, she sees this death happen and stops everything she’s doing to show the audience her sad face.
This somewhat inappropriate moment also drew attention to Prue and Curtis’ relationship, which in the end, felt forced. Prue straight up abandoned Curtis in the middle of the movie! She had evidence her baby brother was dead, not that Curtis was dead! The two of them had mostly separate adventures, so the awkward relationship they had at the start of the movie had little opportunity to grow closer believably.
In response to her praise at the end of the movie, Curtis tells Prue humbly that he didn’t do anything. Prue disagrees and tells him proudly that he did a lot… Well, he might be right that he didn’t do anything. He injected himself into Prue’s adventure to save her brother and had his own mostly inconsequential side quest. Maybe he warmed the bandits toward listening to her plea to fight the final battle, but she had “chosen one” vibes by the time she met them anyway. He introduced the audience to a lot of lore about the world, but he had little purpose in the story to be there. Even if I consider all this “doing a lot,” Prue wasn’t around to witness most of it and has no business telling him that.
Curtis’ apparent lack of purpose made me wonder what his role was supposed to be. If the baby didn’t exist and Prue’s mission was to save Curtis, his role might have made more sense. Curtis could have spent the movie in the witch’s custody while learning about the world and enlisting the bandits to help Prue free him. As it is, the baby has no agency to free itself and its lack of comprehension doesn’t make it a great character for the audience to learn about the world through. Curtis fulfills this role, but he’s not the baby. He’s a redundant, lackluster Prue, who doesn’t care about saving the baby as much as she does.
My analyzing the weaknesses in its story and character development aside, it was a good movie! I liked it a lot.