You're crazy for this one, Laika

Let me begin this movie review by pointing out for any potential parents of young kids out there that Wildwood is rated PG-13, and it is a very hard PG-13. It is a shockingly violent family film with a lot of child (specifically, infant) peril. If our kid had been any younger, I would have pulled him out of there right away. (He is 7, but was strangely prepared for this one. When we saw Elio last year, there was a frightening scene that haunted him for weeks, but it seems things are better for him now. There was a much younger kid next to us, and she did not do well with Wildwood.)

Anyway, Laika – the stop-motion animation studio that created Coraline, ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, The BoxTrolls, and The Missing Link – is back with their sixth feature film. It's their first to be rated PG-13 and their longest film ... in fact, it's the longest stop-motion animated film in history. Director Travis Knight (son of Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike and owner of Laika) set out to make this movie his and Laika's magnum opus, and to say that they delivered is an understatement.

I've long had an intense fascination with stop-motion animation, dating back to the days of Sesame Street and Pee-Wee's Playhouse, but especially due to Will Vinton's Claymation and the advent of the California Raisins. All of Laika's films have been stunning and tremendous feats of human creativity and cinematic achievement, but Wildwood – based on a young adult novel co-written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy – takes everything wonderful and awe-inspiring about Laika and takes it to the next level. And then some.

Every single frame of this sprawling, ambitious film is cram-packed with sumptuous detail, and I took delight in reminding myself that nearly every single element of the movie (there is some CG assistance throughout, but nothing that cheats) is a real thing that exists in the real world, that people moved frame by frame with their hands over the course of the five-or-so years it took to make this film. The parts of the film that don't take place in a hyper-detailed and hyper-specific version of Portland take place inside a dense, lush forest, brimming over with foliage and fauna. More than half of the movie involved crowd scenes, with a mixture of humans and animals, each so instantly identifiable as a discrete character that I eagerly look forward to the eventual coffee table book of the art of the film, where I can pore over each little moose and raccoon and bandit that was lovingly rendered and 3D printed.

Oh, and the entire thing builds to a 30-something-minute battle scene, with warring armies of humans, animals and birds. And explosions. And trebuchets. and horrifyingly accurate cannon warfare.

The trailers say that "it must be seen on the biggest screen possible," and you know what? That isn't bullshit hype. We saw it in a Dolby theater and I'm considering seeing it again in IMAX. This might just blow away any other animated film I've ever seen in terms of sheer things packed into every shot.

(A quick aside here to mention that supreme nepo baby Travis Knight has a very inauspicious history and that Laika was borne out of a tremendous fucking-over of a stop-motion god, the aforementioned Will Vinton. But he's been working as an animator for over 25 years now and it's clear that this is his passion in life, if anything is. Even his two live-action features, Bumblebee and Masters of the Universe, are as much animation as they are anything else. Also, big ups to releasing both Masters of the Universe and Wildwood in the same year, although only one of those took over five years to make. I'll let you guess which one.)

I'm sure I'll be watching behind-the-scenes stuff about Wildwood for the rest of my life, but here's just a tiny taste of what went into this movie and what it ended up looking like.

The icing on the cake here is that every large company in the world is currently burning down their own profit margins in a desperate attempt to convince you that everything needs to become AI. These moron billionaires are trying to grift people into making all-AI movies and television, which is the absolute perfect environment for Laika to (pardon the expression) drop dick on the table and show everyone that THIS is what handmade film is capable of.

Absolutely stunning. Absolutely incredible. An absolute must-see.