This post contains some information about the plot of Wildwood. I promise it’s still worth seeing if you read it.
It takes a lot of effort to make a work of art.
Sometimes it doesn’t look like it. I wrote a poem last weekend that consisted (apart from the title, which is a whole different matter) of thirty words. A decent professional typist could have transcribed that in well under a minute. But of course, transcribing the poem was only a small part of the labor of making it. The initial composition took several minutes at least (I don’t normally time myself in making art, and unless you have a good reason I wouldn’t recommend you do that either). Once I’d composed it, I had to spend additional time refining it—that is, staring at it, and maybe changing some words every now and again. Writing poetry rarely looks interesting from the outside.
Even before I could do any of those things, I needed an idea. The inspiration for this poem came to me all of a sudden, when I happened to see a bird through my window. But the poem did not spring fully formed from a momentary inspiration. To write it I drew upon ideas I had been mulling long before I saw this one bird, ideas from days, months, even a lifetime of thought. I could not begin to account for all the mental effort that ultimately led to the existence of this one little poem.
And yet, the poem was only thirty words after all. Constructing it required no special materials, and no special knowledge beyond what is available to a high school English student. For all the effort behind a single verse, poetry is among the most accessible of the arts. The only absolute minimum requirement is a capacity for language, which is as near to a universal human faculty as you can reasonably get. Nevertheless, words in the right order can move people. This is precisely because they are the product of a lifetime of thought, distilled to express the truth of a moment. We recognize that craft in others because it is essential to ourselves—every time we open our mouths to say something that matters, a part of us is attempting a poem. We succeed more often than we might think.
The craft of poetry is mostly invisible, but we are also visual creatures who delight in the play of color, motion, and form. And just as poetry moves us most when we clearly sense the working of a human mind behind the words, so do we relate most to the visual arts when the trace of humanity is evident in every brush stroke, every gesture, every fingerprint. For any work of art, that trace of humanity is the persistent answer to the question “what has this got to do with us?”
Wildwood first made itself known to the world in 2011 as a fantasy novel by Colin Meloy. Shortly thereafter, Laika Studios (an Oregon-based animation studio) began the process of adapting Wildwood into a feature film—a process completed last week with the film’s release. Laika’s specialty is stop-motion, among the most painstaking animation techniques in use, and the pains taken were extreme. Every scene in the movie had to be acted by posable puppets, photographed 24 times per second of run-time on miniature stages which were in turn dressed and lit as if they were made for real actors to walk about. In a movie set in a lush and vibrant forest, every moving hair and feather, and every leaf or ripple of water blown by the wind, had to be realized in this way.
The puppets, props, and sets were all assembled, painted, and positioned by hand, and the visual effects were almost all practical. Choreographing so much motion one frame at a time involved the work of hundreds of artists and cost $100 million. The money was put to use—virtually every sequence, from sweeping flight and battle scenes to intricate chases through crowds, is a tour-de-force of sophisticated animation. Even if you spare no thought to the “how” of Wildwood‘s production, the spectacle of the results will amaze you almost without cease.
We happen to find ourselves in an era when the most insidious technology that has captivated the heads of major studios is an algorithm that can autonomously generate an imitation of some one else’s creativity. Wildwood, simply by existing in brilliant motion and color, has definitively re-established that nothing can be as compelling as creativity itself. For all of its technical sophistication it is at heart a celebration of the skill of human hands at an ancient craft: evoking the illusion of movement from stillness.
It would have been a shame if the narrative or non-visual storytelling of Wildwood fell short of all that prowess. It’s true that some people enjoy fantasy less than others do, and that coming-of-age stories about adolescents don’t always appeal to people who feel they’ve outgrown them. Even fans of the genre may find that such stories are not always told with the levels of excellence or originality that they deserve. But Wildwood does not come up short in the narrative, and though the broad strokes will be familiar to anybody acquainted with the conventions of fairy tales or high fantasy, it does not allow those conventions to trip up its themes. This movie has important things to say, and it says them in the language of a truly general audience.
As the story unfolded, I found myself increasingly reminded of the animation work of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli; by the time the climactic set-piece battle was underway, I was not surprised to see so many clear parallels with Princess Mononoke in particular. Both movies are ultimately about the tension between powerful natural forces and futile attempts to control them for selfish purposes. Both have antagonists who seek the disruption of the inexorable cycle of nature and mortality, but they both also invite audiences to empathize with their motivations and see them as essentially human. Wildwood’s dowager governess Alexandra is a liar, a murderer, and a ruthless tyrant, but she is also a woman who has suffered a terrible loss; she does not know how to live with her pain, or to live with the reality of death, without bringing more death upon others. She would sacrifice everything and everyone that is real for the sake of a mere simulacrum of life; to even be in a position to make that choice is a tragedy.
Is Wildwood as good a story as Princess Mononoke? I’m not sure that I would go that far (and what an unreasonable standard that would be, anyway). Miyazaki’s films have a moral complexity that nurtures a truly radical clarity, in that their heroes characteristically resolve conflicts without ultimately resorting to the utter destruction of their antagonists. But Wildwood is playing on the same turf, particularly with regard to the utility of violence. In Wildwood, battles are far more frightening than thrilling for their participants. An encounter with death, even the death of an enemy, is a terrible experience and especially so when it comes at the hands of a young hero. There is something to treasure in a story that so clearly recognizes the distinction between having the courage to protect one person and the willingness to harm another, and furthermore that one does not negate the real moral harm that comes from the other.
I suppose that in times like these, I might simply be eager to laud any work of art that clearly and articulately says, “the world can be frightening and the people in it can make devastating, terrible choices, but all of their lives have value and it is worth trying to make a difference.” Can you blame me? There’s a distinct lack of compassionate humanism in the world, and the only cure for that is to stand up and shout for it. That’s as true in the cinema as anywhere else.
Nobody has ever made a stop-motion feature that lasted a hundred and thirty minutes before, but it’s a pleasure to spend all of that time with Wildwood. I loved the skillful balance in the writing of tension and anxiety with such a confident sense of humor (neither too crass for the young nor too juvenile for the old). I loved the abiding affection on display for the Oregon landscape where its fantastical world is set—notably including the city of Portland, so close to the border of “the impassable woods” that it isn’t always obvious where the boundary of the magic lies. I don’t believe I have ever seen real places that I’ve known well so beautifully or convincingly recreated in animation, and rarely has any fictional animated city seemed more full of life.
It matters that this is an Oregon story, because Oregon is a very real place (and a very American place) despite its reputation for strangeness. Its blend of breathtaking scenery and a liberated culture of individuality with a dark legacy of colonialism and environmental degradation finds full expression through fantasy, building up the imaginary realm with the real waters and timbers of the Willamette valley. Although Wildwood is a conflicted place and its many inhabitants are divided against each other by mistrust and old grievances, its physical and cultural cohesion is evidenced by the land itself. Even if you have never seen the Pacific Northwest, I’m sure you will recognize it.
If I have one complaint about the world building, it would have to be the unfortunate use of a much too common trope: despite incorporating a diversity of talking animals into a fantastical society with humans, Wildwood seemingly pushes the myth that there are “bad animals” (in this case, the crows and coyotes) and “good animals” (all the others, more or less). I don’t think this arrangement is particularly consonant with the movie’s larger themes, if we are meant to think of the animals as basically people. Even if we aren’t, a story with such reverence for nature ought to have more carefully avoided the equation of certain parts of the natural world with human moral evils.
Is that enough to derail my enjoyment of Wildwood? Definitely not. I have more serious concerns about other stories I like just as much. The art of storytelling requires growth—someday soon, Laika or some other studio will try to match or exceed this feat, and their efforts will be guided by innumerable lifetimes of thought. Wildwood may be a masterpiece, but it is not the final word on the art or craft of animation. It’s a powerful stimulus to keep an old conversation going, to talk about things that really matter in the language of motion.
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