I’m not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio’s history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that’s where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features of the 21st Century and still the high-watermark for Laika. Both of those things and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee, as they say, and after leaving Laika in the same year he helped birth it, Selick has been busily failing to get one project after another off the ground. And so it is only now, nearly a decade and a half-later (and almost exactly seven years after the project was announced) that Selick has finally been able to give the world Wendell & Wild, his fifth feature in 29 years, based on an unpublished book he wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman, from a screenplay he wrote with Jordan Peele (whose production company, Monkeypaw Productions, has footed the bill for the project, along with Netflix).
To judge from the finished product, those 13 years were full of a great many ideas, and Selick was unwilling to part with any of them. Wendell & Wild is certainly not a bad film – far from it, it’s overabundant with narrative conceits and stylistic flourishes, and whatever else we can say about it, it is obviously and gloriously the work of somebody with a voracious hunger to do stuff, push the medium every which way, experiment with all of the new toys that have been developed in his absence. It is fearlessly creative in a way that animated features are uniquely bad at being, and I wish we had ten movies half as bold as it every year.
So no, not a bad film. But it is unmistakably, even objectively, an overstuffed film. Did I wish for ten movies half as bold? Aye, and that’s at least in part because half of Wendell & Wild would be just about the right amount. Doesn’t even matter which half. Just less of it, fewer plotlines and fewer characters anchoring them, not so many different aesthetic impulses and less flagrant capital-D Directing! for the impulses that were left behind. To be blunt about it, Wendell & Wild is downright exhausting, a movie that had largely worn me into submission before it was even a third of the way through its 105 minutes, a point that I believe corresponds to its third or fourth act break.
To give as streamlined a version of the story as I can: Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross) is a tremendously gloomy 13-year-old orphan, whose parents died in a car accident that she was pretty much directly responsible for causing. This has left her even less receptive to the usual “there, there, these things happen” boilerplate than the average grieving adolescent, and this has manifested in a surly, destructive lashing-out at the world. And this has resulted in a lot of time spent in juvenile detention, which has made her a candidate for a new social program sending troubled youths to high-performing private schools, allegedly in the hopes that having access to the best teachers and whatnot will help break the cycle of incarceration. In fact, the program is a fraud being put up by the Klaxons, Irmgard (Maxine Peake) and Lane (David Harewood), owners of a chain of private prisons, who are hoping to make money on both sides, first by extracting charity dollars and second by making sure those charity cases end up heading straight to prison after school has failed them. And they have their newest planned prison set for the exact same town where Kat has just been sent, the exact same town where her parents owned a brewery before their deaths. So she is simultaneously dealing with the fresh hell of returning to the site of her childhood trauma while also taking up the gauntlet her parents dropped, resisting the Klaxons’ corrupt scheme.
Note that I have gotten through both the A-plot (Kat coming to terms with her parents’ death) and one of the many B-plots of Wendell & Wild without even mentioning Wendell & Wild. They’re a pair of demons voiced, respectively, by Keegan-Michael Key and Peele, and the puppets playing them have been conspicuously designed to look like Key and Peele. They’re also the sons of “Buffalo” Belzer (Ving Rhames), the overseer of some corner of Hell, and they harbor a longstanding dream of making an elaborate amusement park for the souls of the damned, one that’s more fun than Belzer’s current torture chamber that’s also an amusement park. And they do this by coming up to the world of the living in the exact same town, drawn by Kat herself, who is revealed as being a “hell maiden”, though if I am being honest, I’m not entirely sure what that means, other than that it forces her into close contact with Wendell & Wild.
That’s probably the B-plot of B-plots, but Wendell & Wild isn’t done throwing out narrative lines. I’m done relating them, because I don’t want this entire review to be plot summary, and the point is clear enough: Wendell & Wild is a mess. It has so much stuff going on, all spinning out in wild curves and spirals, much – but not all! – of it tied into an elaborate system of afterlife mythology that Selick & Peele obviously take to be more intuitive than it actually is. This is all in service to a story that is extremely blunt in its discussion of social themes – it’s a children’s movie about for-profit private prisons, after all – though at least the ham-fisted message movie element of the film makes sense, something I cannot always say for the story itself.
And just as much as the script is a whirling sprawl of all the ideas all at once, so too is the animation something like an encyclopedia of excess. Wendell & Wild, in keeping with most of Selick’s earlier films (besides Coraline, there’s also The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), is stop-motion animation, though it’s very much the hybrid form of stop-motion and fully-rendered CGI that has marked all of Laika’s films (including Coraline, though that film has a relatively little amount of computer animation compared to what follows). At the same time, unlike any of Laika’s films, Wendell & Wild isn’t looking to create the most smooth and fluid hybrid it can; it is, on the contrary, positively wallowing in the hand-crafted stiffness and toylike physicality of the medium. Most noticeably, the characters’ faces haven’t been digitally “glued” together: like most high-end stop-motion these days, all of the facial expressions consist of two pieces, the eyes and the mouth, joined at the nose, and Selick has elected to eschew the Laika trick of blending the seam between them in a computer (this same deliberate “look at these constructed puppets! think about how they are objects, not people!” gesture showed up in the 2015 film Anomalisa). If anything, it appears that the gap is slightly bigger than it needs to be, like Selick didn’t just want to avoid digitally covering his tracks, he wanted to make sure we noticed. Same thing with the texture of the puppets, which is so smooth and plasticky: every part of every character feels molded out of the same material, without even the slightest feint in the direction of pretending that these are anything other than small dolls being manipulated on doll-sized sets.
That’s one extreme approach; the film also goes all the way over to a completely distant extreme in its camera movement, with Selick refusing to settle in for any scene when he can instead swoop in on canted angles and slide back and forth. It’s a tremendously busy visual scheme, and it’s matched with equally busy design: every single character is some kind of extreme caricature, almost like trying to translate Al Hirschfeld’s line drawings into three-dimensional puppets. Plus, they’re brightly-colored and grotesque, far more enthusiastically morbid than in any of Selick’s previous horror-tinged films (not for nothing, Wendell & Wild is his first film to be rated PG-13), particularly once the re-animated corpses start showing up.
It’s just a whole lot to look at, between the design, the technique, and the enthusiastic physicality of the medium itself. And I find this all delightful and whatnot, but it’s just tiring as it keeps hammering away, nonstop, for so long. The Nightmare Before Christmas is just as much a narratively scattered whirlwind of gruesome design conceits as this, but that film was obliged to limit itself to what could be physically depicted, without the expansive, kinetic CGI-sweetening present all through Wendell & Wild; more importantly, it was over and done in 76 minutes, including credits. Wendell & Wild is boundlessly creative, but it’s also overstuffed and dizzying, and while I’m so grateful to have a filmmaker with a grand-scale vision making movies like this, I would maybe not mind if his vision had been just slightly more contained by, like, any discipline.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
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