Wildwood
Without a doubt the most upsetting and violent family film I have ever seen. How the absolute hell did this get away with a PG rating?
They don’t kill the baby, but they get really, really, REALLY close. Dare I say this one was a bit too much for me?
The first thing people will tell you about Wildwood is that it’s a technical marvel. Years upon years of time and effort went into the most ambitious stop-motion film of all time – and good lord, does the craft show onscreen. There’s just as much “woah, how did they do that?” to be found here as any Avatar film. It’s heroically handmade, and calling it a tremendous effort would be the understatement of the century. The third-act final battle is a full-blown stop-motion take on something out of Lord of The Rings or Sergei Bondarchuk’s work – can you even imagine how hard it would’ve been to animate all of that? I’m almost glad that Travis Knight didn’t get swallowed up by the franchise machine over at Transformers, no matter how much I love the beginning of Bumblebee, because he directs the hell out of this. Dario Marianelli scores the hell out of it too.
Unfortunately, the technical mastery is let down by a patchy script. There’s a tearjerking, strong emotional core about grief that shines through the most when the film slows down and quietens down – most of the time when it’s focusing on the heroine and villain, both played brilliantly by Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Carey Mulligan. Other than them and a few other highlights (Mahershala Ali is always, always a win), there are way too many side characters who don’t contribute very much (though surprisingly, the Awkwafina rat is quite endearing). This overstuffing leads to bad pacing, as the film sprints from scene to scene and not all of them were necessarily as important as the others. Not to mention the humour’s mostly unfunny too – not everyone needs to be quipping! The main comedic relief sidekick is very irritating, but then he gets irreversibly traumatised in the final battle which is somewhat hilarious in a dark way. It muddies the best parts, that they’re lost among a bad script and bad humour. Because when this gets to take a breather, it’s among the most moving animated films I’ve seen in a long time. If only the filmmakers had more faith in the film to let it be itself, and not this weaker, attempted wide-appeal thing.
For me though, Wildwood will be remembered for how extremely violent, brutal, bloody, and upsetting it is for a “family” film (if it can even be called that). I am shocked ratings boards across the world let this through without an R-rating – I’m not kidding, you can see a decapitated head fly across the screen at one point. The tone of this film is beyond messy – I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone below sixteen, but then it’s almost a bit too childish at times for adults. There’s a staggering amount of violence, and all of it is severely brutal – I’ve seen historical war films less traumatising than this. There are moments of ultraviolence peppered throughout – and then the final battle comes and…good lord. Like I said – onscreen decapitation! And if that’s not enough – a crow gets ripped in half by someone’s bare hands, characters get covered in flaming oil, there’s animalistic mauling, death by angry vines, sacrificial daggers, catapults, impalement, gunshots, and all kinds of grief and rage. Maybe I’m just clutching my pearls here, because I used to write very violent films then I suppose I mellowed out. If you don’t mind ultraviolence, then I guess you’ll have a good time. I just think it makes for a bizarre and upsetting experience that this family film is so distressing. The line “That’s Mommy’s sacrificial dagger” was not on my bingo card.
What a wonderful birthday, a wee bit of traumatising the children and the 23-year-olds never hurt anyone!