Movie Review - Wildwood
Let me start with a warning: this is not a movie for young kids. There is a child’s quasi-suicide in the opening two minutes and later in a battle scene we see a silloetted decapitation and of course an attempted infanticide.
Animation Style
This is the main draw. The team at Laika Studios is amazing. Kubo, Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Missing Link are all outstanding. Kubo is my favorite animated movie ever. I could watch that movie every day, and twice on Sunday.
The Wildwood animation is as impressive as anything they’ve ever done and I think their eye for adding cinematic scenes is improving—if that’s even possible.
Story
This is the only place I have anything negative to say about the movie. Not that it’s bad. It’s just not great. The exposition scenes are too obvious and there are too many characters that exist only to advance the plot without contributing anything individually. For instance, you could remove The General from the movie and nothing would change. The General should have either had an expanded role or be cut out completely.
Moral of the Story
My first thought after the movie ended was to try and pick out the lessons learned and Prue’s arc as the heroine. But it is a challenge to provide a real moral message in stories where the villain is defeated. That’s because the villain was wrong in the beginning, and wrong at the end, and then overcome. Nothing really changes. The story then is the struggle that the hero goes through. But I don’t see anything that Prue went through that changes her at any point in the story. Maybe there’s something there that I’m missing. If you see it, please share in the comments below.
Grade: B
| Rated: | (PG-13) Thematic Material | Language | Brief Partial Nudity | Bloody Images | Strong Fantasy Violence | Suicide-Related Material |
| Genres: | Adventure, Animation, Fantasy |
| USA release date: | 2026-10-23 |
| Movie length: | 130 minutes |
| Starring: | Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant |
| Director: | Travis Knight |
| Writer(s): | Chris Butler |
| Language: | en |
| Country: | US |
Plot
Prue and her classmate Curtis are drawn into a magical forest filled with enchanted creatures, loyal allies, and formidable adversaries as they embark on a desperate quest to rescue Prue’s abducted baby brother from a murder of crows led by a mysterious woman named Alexandra.
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