For those who aren’t familiar, Supreme is a streetwear brand that started in New York City about thirty years ago. They came up selling clothes with aggressively simple designs and unlicensed images at outrageous markups. Case in point: Two identical rain jackets — made by the same manufacturer with the same materials — could cost $300 in one store and $1,300 at Supreme. And it’s a massively successful company with a slavishly loyal worldwide following, valued at over a billion dollars.
How did they do it? In large part, because of forced artificial shortages. Supreme only releases a new clothing line once or twice a year. Anyone who wants to buy something from the latest release has to win a lottery just to get in line at one of their physical locations. And they only have 17 physical locations in the entire world, 11 of which are in the U.S.
It’s genuinely fascinating how a business model so diabolical could be so antithetical to capitalism as we usually see it. The mad genius of Supreme is that they’ve mastered limiting their supply just enough to drive up demand, thus making their consumers feel like they’ve won entry into some exclusive club. And paying through the nose for the privilege. This is how a common T-shirt could be elevated into a luxury status symbol.
It’s a high-risk/high-reward business model. And by necessity, this isn’t something that just any company can do. For instance, Laika.
Laika doesn’t try to forcibly insert themselves into our everyday lives like Netflix or Amazon do. Laika doesn’t run on sequels and tentpole franchises like Disney or Warner Bros. Laika doesn’t flood the market with low-budget movies like Neon or A24. In point of fact, Laika’s methods are so expensive, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and dependent on tangible properties that take up so much real estate to be manufactured and stored, they are physically incapable of operating like any other studio or releasing more than one movie every two or three years.
Precisely because stop-motion animation is so expensive and difficult to produce at scale, Laika is delivering something that nobody else can or will. And precisely because it takes so long to produce, the artisans at Laika have so much more time to fine-tune each and every last frame to perfection. Furthermore, because sequels will never be an option, the filmmakers can put all their focus into making a single perfect stand-alone movie without worrying about cliffhangers or leftover plot threads.
Simply put, Laika makes perfect movies. Period. That may sound like an exaggeration, but when goddamn Missing Link is the weakest entry in a studio’s filmography, that’s as close to batting a thousand as anyone’s ever come. And precisely because their movies are so damned good, made with such overwhelming passion, delivering something like no other studio would ever dare to attempt, of course that’s going to leave a distinct nostalgic print that will keep the old fans coming back and the new fans coming in to pay admission and rediscover the magic several years later.
Put it this way: Take everything that made The Nightmare Before Christmas a perennial nostalgic favorite and expand that into an entire studio’s business model. That’s Laika.
And now we finally have Wildwood. After fifteen fucking years in development. And a whopping seven years after their previous film. What’s more, as if to prove how much time and effort Laika put into this, the film weighs in at 131 minutes. Which reportedly makes it the longest stop-motion animated feature in history. And when’s the last time you saw an animated film in any medium that was over two hours long?!
This release would be a big enough deal for the movie world in general, but it means something else entirely here in Portland. The company, workforce, and filmography of Laika are all directly integrated into Portland culture in too many ways to list here. The source book was written by Colin Meloy, who was already Portland cultural royalty as the frontman of the Decemberists. (And of course the Decemberists contributed a new song for the movie. Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention Meloy’s wife, Carson Ellis, who illustrated the books.) The story is set in Portland, putting an enchanted spin on a variety of iconic local landmarks on the west side.
Everyone in this whole city expected Laika to deliver their crowning masterpiece. Laika has done so much for our city, they’ve put so many of our friends and neighbors to work in making this movie, and we’ve all had to wait fifteen fucking years to see a replica of our beloved city hand-crafted and brought to life as only Laika could do.
The excitement here in Portland is palpable. The promotions have been groundbreaking. Like never before, it feels like a movie was genuinely made of, by, and for Portlanders, like each and every one of us in the Willamette Valley is a part of this event.
Luckily for all of us, it really is that damned good.
We lay our scene in Forest Park, so called because it is in fact both a forest and a park. One of the largest urban forest reserves in the nation, with old growth and second-growth forests taking up a huge chunk of Portland’s northwest. Our story is set in a heightened fantasy version of Stumptown, in which Forest Park has more or less the same geography, but it’s now an impassable fantasyland — literally called the Impassable Wilderness — filled with anthropomorphic talking animals. As to why anyone built the St. John’s Bridge and the Columbia Railroad Bridge — complete with an operating train line! — across the Willamette to an unmapped forest where nobody ever enters or comes out, I don’t have those answers.
I hasten to add that the non-fictional Portland is indeed lovingly rendered. We’re treated to a fantastic montage in the opening act, taking us through the waterfront, the White Stag sign, Powell’s Books, Voodoo Doughnuts, Skidmore Fountain, the MAX train, the freaking Unipiper gets a cameo, literally all that’s missing is Pioneer Square. This is exactly what it’s like to spend a day in downtown Portland. Granted, it’s just a touch improbable that a teenage girl could get there from St. John’s on bicycle (Google Maps says it would take roughly an hour), but whatever. I don’t even care, it’s beautiful.
As for the actual plot, what we’ve got here is a standard monomyth, in which an infant boy (Mac McKeel, voiced by Arthur Knight, son of director/CEO Travis Knight) is inexplicably kidnapped by a shit-ton of crows and flown off into the Impassable Wilderness. Thus Mac’s older sister (Prue, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) ventures off into the forest to try and get him back.
(Side note: The crows here in Portland have serious notoriety, but I’m not aware of any real incident when they’ve absconded with small children.)
This rescue quest is complicated by all the forest’s numerous factions and political influences who’ve been squabbling with each other for generations. Chief among them is Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), the dowager governess who got herself exiled from the South Woods. In the time since, she’s been gathering the coyotes and crows to serve her own nefarious ends. (It’s a long story.) Opposite her is the current governor of South Wood (Lars Svik, voiced by Marc Evan Jackson), a handsome nitwit too focused on keeping up appearances without any capacity for independent thought or action (complete with a corrupt advisor, voiced by Jemaine Clement).
Then we’ve got the Avian Principality (led by Owl Rex, voiced by Richard E. Grant), who are at least concerned about the unfolding situation and yet frustratingly incapable of doing anything about it. Though I’d be remiss not to mention the General (Angela Bassett), a giant golden eagle who takes us on a breathtaking aerial chase.
Then we’ve got the factions that are less politically powerful, but actually capable of getting shit done. Brendan (Mahershala Ali) is the Bandit King, leader of the forest outlaws. One character explicitly draws the Robin Hood comparison, which of course goes nowhere. Last but not least is Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal), leader of the North Wood mystics who care for the forest’s oldest tree and a whole town full of gardeners and peasants.
There’s a lot of ground here to cover and a massive world to build. Luckily, Prue crossed over with an acquaintance of hers (Curtis, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, more on him later) and the two get split up quickly. Which means that we cover twice the ground in the same time. This could’ve gone wrong in so many ways, but the filmmakers effectively utilize voice-over and editing to keep it all balanced.
Put it all together and what we’ve got here is a story with a boilerplate Hero’s Journey template that’s easy to follow, but it’s spiced up with themes of grief, war, growing up, and the cost of chasing dreams. Of course it certainly helps that Laika has never been afraid of scaring their young intended audience, and they don’t shy away from killing characters onscreen. That bold and direct approach gives the action and themes so much more heft.
Then we have the animation. It’s flawless. As practiced as the team at Laika is, I’m still astounded at how every microscopic gesture looks so fluid and lifelike. But what’s even more incredible are the action scenes. We’re talking about scenes involving huge swarms of crows, and battle scenes with literal armies of characters knocking each other every which way. There are so many moving pieces on display here, every last one painstakingly positioned by hand. And it all looks so effortlessly credible in the moment, only now can I step back and admire the picometer-perfect measurements and triple-checked calculations it must have taken to make everything look this smooth at this speed. Couple it with a soaring musical score from Dario Marianelli and you’ve got a sight to behold.
It’s difficult for me to go into much more detail, partly to avoid spoilers and partly because the film is simply that perfect. I don’t know how else to describe it, this is unquestionably peak cinema. Everything is in top form, everything fires on all cylinders, everything meshes together to create a marvelous work of fantasy on an epic scope.
…Okay, maybe not everything.
For all that I love about this movie, I have one glaring complaint: The comic relief. First and foremost, there’s Curtis. I get what the filmmakers were going for here: A clumsy loser with an unrequited crush on Prue, slowly developing the courage to find a wholesome middle road between warrior and wimp. Unfortunately, he’s way too cringe-inducing at the outset, his growth arc doesn’t come until too late, his final form isn’t compelling enough when it finally comes, and he’s consistently too annoying to be funny. What sucks is that Laika has effectively delivered this kind of comic relief sidekick before (Wybie in Coraline, Neil in ParaNorman, etc.), but those were always kept as sidekicks. Curtis is effectively a co-lead here, and that turned out to be a bridge too far.
We’ve also got Septima, a talking rat voiced by Awkwafina. A character who comes out of nowhere, helps our main cast without any conceivable motivation for doing so, and leaves the film just as abruptly. And she still fares better than Charlie Day, here voicing a misfit coyote. This nincompoop is totally useless from start to finish and wears out his welcome pretty much immediately.
Overall, Wildwood is easily the most amazing fantasy epic I’ve seen in the past twenty years. This absolutely deserves to be in the same class as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the first Chronicles of Narnia film. We wanted a masterpiece that perfectly distilled everything that makes Laika wonderful, wrapped up in a heartfelt declaration of love for the city of Portland, and that’s exactly what we got. Everything about this movie is so beautiful, so poignant, so exciting and energetic and creative that the lackluster comic relief barely weighs it down.
In a truly historic year for animation, this registers as a phenomenal accomplishment. See it now, on the biggest possible screen. And don’t forget the mid-credits glimpse behind the scenes.
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