‘Wildwood’ Review: Carey Mulligan Leads Voice Cast Of Laika’s Ambitious And Visually Stunning Stop-Motion Fantasy Epic – London Film Festival

Laika, the Oregon animation house that specializes in stop motion, has a perfect track record of landing Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations for all four of its first films: Coraline, ParaNorman, Missing Link, and Kubo and the Two Strings. With its latest and unquestionably most ambitious project Wildwood, the streak could well continue. This film has been gestating at Laika for 16 years, finally starting production in 2021, and now having its world premiere today at the London Film Festival. It is also slated to open AFI Fest later this month for its North American premiere in Hollywood.

For director-producer Travis Knight, who is also CEO of Laika, this adaptation of Colin Meloy’s book has been a personal dream, especially since the setting of the book, and now the film, is right in his hometown of Portland, OR. How could he resist? A sweeping fantasy right in your own backyard featuring a magical forbidden forest of talking animals mixed with humans? It all becomes the center of a truly epic story that feels born to be on the big screen. The painstaking stop-motion animation process applied to a tale on a scale rarely seen on this level is a visual knockout, and the story is a compelling one focused on a scrappy young heroine determined to fight back and save her baby brother after he is harrowingly abducted from the streets of Portland by a murder of crows.

Prue McKeel (nicely voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a loyal and loving teen girl who promises her parents she will take good care of her baby brother Mac on a normal sunny day outing. It turns out to be a frightening one when Mac is snatched up by a menacing swarm of black crows who swoop down in unison from the sky and fly away with him. Her frantic efforts to catch up fail and she sees the birds disappear into the adjoining forbidden forest known to allow no outsiders. Unable to go back home and explain to her parents (Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson), she sets off to find Mac and bring him back. No easy task, but her rather awkward and far less adventurous classmate Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay) offers any help he can supply, which isn’t much. Still, he sets out to follow her into the forest where after an encounter with the imposing uniformed coyotes who patrol the place gets separated from Prue.

Soon both are swept up, on individual tracks into this world like something out of Lewis Carroll, as they go down the rabbit hole into a society like no other — a land of talking animals, bandits, wise owls, even a loyal rat and more. For Curtis it is meeting the evil Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) who attempts to bring him into her fold. She is a woman devastated by the death of her only son, so much so she can’t function and turns her grief into no good, with the coyote force in lockstep for her dark ambitions. When Curtis sees what she is up to he refuses and is tossed into a prison with other rejects.

Meanwhile, Prue, meeting The General (Angela Bassett), the wise Great Eagle leader of the Avian Principality, as well as Brendan, the empathetic leader of the outcast Bandits, uses every intuition she has to navigate this dense landscape. Eventually all roads lead her to Alexandra, who lies to her. She encourages her to go home to her parents, saying it is better for a grieving mother to know the truth of what happened to her child. Prue follows the advice, confesses what happened to Mac, and discovers the secret her parents have been keeping from her all along.

There is much more to come in this two-hour-plus adaptation including a battle royale that will see Prue returning for a massive fight to the finish, still hoping to navigate a happy ending.

With six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) working for the first time on an animated film, the visual palette based in part on the book’s gorgeous illustrations by Caron Ellis is breathtaking. Deschanel makes the stop-motion process feel like live action, the camera picking up character heartache and triumph in ways I haven’t quite seen before in this form. Knight is a born storyteller so the emphasis is always on that, and even though the visuals are quite awesome in their own right, they never overwhelm. Character development is key here, as it was in the book, and each is fully fleshed out. Among them is Bassett’s commanding eagle, the General; Brendan (powerfully voiced by Mahershala Ali), leader of the Bandits; Maksim (Tom Waits), loyal coyote foot soldier to the Dowager Governess; regal Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal); bumbling coyote Dmitri (Charlie Day); reclusive aging owl Rex (Richard E. Grant); and Septima, a little rat who rises to the occasion and will break your heart (wonderfully voiced by Awkwafina).

There can be no doubt Meloy created this sweeping story in the tradition of other epics like Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia, and though Wildwood isn’t quite up on that mountain it ably marches to its own drummer, a story of grief, courage, determination and triumph, and yet another Laika stop-motion gem that stays in the heart.

Producers are Knight and Sam Wilson.

Title: Wildwood
Festival: London
Distributor: Fathom
Release date: October 23, 2026
Director: Travis Knight
Screenwriter: Chris Butler
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Angela Bassett, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Maya Erskine, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant, Amanda Stenberg, Tantoo Cardinal, Len Cariou, Marc Evan Jackson
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 2 hr 12 mins