reviews
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reviews 〰️
AAAAAAAAAAH I MISSED TWO WEEKS OF POSTS WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY REGULARITY
I’ve had different people over for the past 2-3 weeks and have been doing quite some stuff but that also means I’ve got TONS of inspo for upcoming posts so still all good. That’s the only excuse I got, I’m sorry.
Either way, less talk talk about this, and more read read about WILDWOOD.
As you’ve probably noticed from my post about Soy Frankelda, I’m a sucker for stopmotion animation (or animation in general but that’s a story for another time — she said in the voice of Baroness Von BonBon).
So when Wildwood was announced, yes I went to the London Film Festival to attend the World Premiere.
Yes I went to the Wildwood Exhibit at the Design Museum with my mom.
Yes I went to the theatre the day it was officially released to see it again with my boyfriend.
And yes I went to the exhibit again with said-boyfriend.
Did I enjoy Wildwood? I don’t know, have a look at this lengthy article and take a wild (haha, get it?) guess.
— SPOILERS AHEAD —
If I’m fully honest with myself, I wasn’t sure which angle to tackle this film with, because there is just SO MUCH to say. But I think I will start with what struck me the most when watching this.
Prue and Curtis are sent into two different genres of story.
These two adorable babies get separated quite early on in the film. From this point on, Prue gets the classic ‘Discover the world, move from one place to the next, albeit sometimes in a hurry because you are being chased.’
She gets to discover the Woods relatively peacefully, has time for conversations with various authority figures across the Woods that allow her to better understand how everything works, she is the eyes through which the audience discovers the Woods, she holds the information. Granted, she doesn’t really care for all this, but regardless it is the role she is given. She meets the postman who serves as a guide and introduction, meets the General and thus the concept of the Avian Principality, and is then taken to South Wood, and later on in the film to North Wood. So on, and so forth. She meets the important people, she gets given the lore, and although she is being held captive at some point, she is given moments to rest, to talk, to understand.
Prue meets multiple people willing to help her, and is truly only ever confronted to the gravity of the situation and the danger of the woods during the scene that had everyone gasp in the theater, the death of the General. That arrow that sharply interrupted an inspirational melody to take down the beautiful puppet of this giant bird was there to remind us that even if Prue’s journey remains mostly calm, she is not safe. No one is.
Prue is constantly being chased, and to be fair, not everyone is that helpful. Yet, despite the danger that remains lurking in the shadows, her journey through the woods remains mostly away from the battlefield. Because this is not her lesson to learn. Prue is a very practical child, she is logical, responsible and already acts like an adult. She feels that she has to. Her parents, “hippies” as she likes to say with an eye roll, are well-meaning but also waaaaaaaay too chill. Even slightly immature.
I mean, their response to their second child being taken away by a witch because of a deal THEY MADE being “we’ll call the FBI” tells you everything about why Prue acts so much older than her age. She feels she has to, and with parents like these… Maybe she does.
Her journey into the Woods was there to teach her that no matter how mature she is, there will always be things she doesn’t know nor understand and that she will have to tackle nonetheless. Yes her parents are hippies (and terrible communicators) but they still knew things she did not. Prue had to learn that sometimes there isn’t a reasonable or satisfactory explanation but that she would have to carry on. That sometimes even “immature people” will know something she doesn’t. She proudly tells Alexandra “I don’t want any part of your fairy tale.”, because she is such a grown up she has no time for such stories, except she is part of the fairy tale. It wasn’t a choice, it never was, and her stubbornness to remain out of it and pretend none of this was rational or had anything to do with her was not helpful to her quest and goal.
Prue was too grown up. She had to be reminded that she is still a child, and that no, she does not know everything.
Curtis, on the other hand, was quite open to this world. He approached the Woods with more excitement, more wonder. I mean obviously he was also terrified of its many dangers, but unlike Prue, still had space for that childlike awe. I mean come on, talking Coyotes in uniform.
It is established Curtis is a fan of everything fantasy related. He plays tabletop rpg after all. He even mentions considering becoming a warrior after school, which is just another reminder that he remains a child. We chuckle at the line because oh sweet curtis that is not an actual job in the real world.
Exactly.
Curtis is still naive and innocent enough to actually consider it because he likes his games.
Prue acts like an adult, so the Woods treat her like a child.
Curtis acts like a child, so the Woods will treat him like an adult.
Curtis does not get Prue’s treatment. She experiences the peaceful side of the Woods, the “leave us out of your war” part of the Woods.
Curtis is thrown onto the front lines. Hosted by the Dowager in person. He does not get a clear view of the Woods. Only the words of a woman on the brink of madness, that he sees switch from one personality to the next, victim of her visions. One minute a caring mother that sees another, the next a cold-blooded ruler devoid of empathy.
Curtis gets handed a sword and a uniform, not for play. He gets taken to a battle field, walks over countless corpses, and is then asked to kill a man, only to see him brutally murdered regardless after he refuses. This is no longer a game. Any childlike innocence he might have harboured when walking into the Woods gets brutally stripped from his soul by the horrors of war, real war.
Every heroic action he tries to take results in death.
Curtis refuses to kill the man, he is killed regardless.
Curtis—with the bandits’ help— tries to warn Prue that the Dowager is dangerous, multiple bandits get killed in order to be silenced.
Curtis tries to fight back in battle and gets disarmed, Septima gets killed while saving him (I cried for the rat, yes I did).
Curtis defends Prue so that she can save her brother, he kills the Coyote Commander.
The last death is by his hand. He saved Prue yes. But it is not a heroic moment. It is traumatic. Something that will scar him forever. He no longer is the overjoyed boy who wanted to be a warrior when he would grow up. He is the boy who knows there is no winner in a war, and your hands cannot be clean if you join a battlefield.
This is something that I really like about Wildwood. It does not sugarcoat war. The final battle is not cool. I mean yes, the animation is absolutely stunning and it truly is a masterpiece in terms of techniques and visuals.
But narratively? Horror. Death. Blood. Characters brutally die, eyes are taken out of their socket by crows, people are burned alive, crushed under catapults, etc, etc.
It depicts the horror of war. I have seen some people say Wildwood is not a kid’s movie.
I disagree. It is. Children can handle complicated storylines. Children deserve to know that no, a battlefield might sound cool on paper, but is not something you should aspire to ever be on. Children deserve to see villains driven to madness by grief and love.
I have seen some people say that Prue’s parents are worse than Alexandra.
Honestly? All are terribles at various degree and for different reasons.
Prue’s parents crime is that they were not emotionally mature enough to handle the situation they threw themselves in, which forced their eldest child to mature early.
Alexandra was a loving parent, but became possessive. She brought her son back to life in a robot body that would probably never age, she stripped him of his identity so that he would remain her son forever. She committed massacre, caused war, kidnapped and planned to sacrifice a baby. She intended a genocide on all life in the forest to get back what could never even truly be her son.
But despite all that, she was still able to make faces and coo at Prue’s baby brother. She was still able to appear kind to Prue and Curtis when she needed to or was shaken up by visions.
Children can handle that type of complexity. Yes if you hold a sword it means you have to understand you will have to use it. Yes the lady making the baby laugh in one scene can intend to kill it in the next. Appearances are deceitful. Children need to know that.
I love Wildwood because in addition to being an absolute masterpiece of technical animation, and just a feast for the eyes —I mean COME ON— it also does something many media targeted towards children shy away from nowadays, being scary, and sometimes a bit too real. Some of the books and films or stories that we used to consume were genuinely scary, not for the sake of it, but because there are lessons to take from it. If we sugarcoat things too much, we remove the ability to learn and prepare them for the world.
Wildwood is the perfect mixture of both, similar to old fairy tales told around a fire in the middle of the night. Enchanting and ominous.
And if you’d like to get a glimpse of the wonderful work that went into building this film (16 YEARS OF HARD WORK) and don’t live in London, I’ve put all the pictures from the Wildwood Exhibit on a Pinterest Board.
other trinkets at the bottom of my bag
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