‘Wildwood’ Review: Laika’s Epic Stop-Motion Wonder Lacks the Magic of the Studio’s Best Movies

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On the one hand, Travis Knight’s “Wildwood” is an epic, eye-popping, and almost unfathomably well-crafted celebration of everything that makes Laika special — of everything that makes the Oregon-based stop-motion studio a singular force for good in a film industry where most companies are less interested in savoring the magic of animation than they are in seeing how many shortcuts they can take without breaking its spell. On the other hand, the remarkable time and care that went into “Wildwood” doesn’t prevent it from being the least enchanting of Laika’s films, even if its flaws help to reinforce the power of a story about how magic can persist in spite of itself.

The longest and most ambitious movie of its kind ever made, this sprawling fantasy saga about the overlap between reality and imagination — about a teenage girl in the Pacific Northwest who ventures into an enchanted kingdom to rescue her toddler little brother after he’s abducted there by a murder of crows — pushes the form to new extremes at a time when the rest of the business is hoping that audiences will learn to settle for less. It’s a mad feat of muchness.

Laika 3D-printed 142,000 different face models, hand-molded 728 individual trees, and used more than 715 miles of brass wire across 1,155 days of production. They created a “Braveheart”-style battle one frame at a time, built a perfect miniature replica of Powell’s City of Books to bring the movie’s version of Portland to life (complete with a Drag Queen Story Hour sign), and even designed tiny little Decemberists posters to adorn the heroine’s living room; she seems to be more of a fan of their post-“The Crane Wife” output, but I’m trying my best not to hold that against her.

That degree of loving attention comes at a massive price, of course (with one negligible exception, each of Laika’s films has cost more and grossed less than the one before it), but studio owner and Nike co-founder Phil Knight can certainly afford it, and it doesn’t hurt that his son is running the shop. Not all Hollywood nepo babies! In lieu of any prolonged fawning over the pursuits of a billionaire heir, let’s just say the Skydance merger would probably seem a bit less cataclysmic if David Ellison were capable of directing something as artful and transcendent as “Kubo and the Two Strings” (or even something as competent and colorful as last summer’s live-action “Masters of the Universe,” for that matter).

Which is all to say that “Wildwood” epitomizes why Laika should be treated like a national treasure: It’s stunning, it’s sincere, it’s possessed by a combination of American moxie and a Ghibli-esque willingness to push young audiences out of their comfort zones, and it’s seemingly at peace with losing enough money to sink any other animation studio on the planet. It is, in so many respects, the ultimate testament to what makes Laika unique. It’s also, in so many others, the first of their movies that doesn’t feel as special as it looks (and sometimes doesn’t look as special as it should feel).

Appropriately enough for a project that suggests Laika’s care may not be enough to preserve its magic, “Wildwood” is a story about losing faith in the wonder of the world. And appropriately enough for a project that still has so much to offer in spite of its flaws, “Wildwood” is also a story about how magic can persist in our lives even after we stop believing in it — even after its child-like purity gives way to something mottled and imperfect.

It’s a story that Knight and Laika’s go-to screenwriter Chris Butler have adapted from the 2011 novel of the same name by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, and from the Carson Ellis illustrations that brought that book to life. (Ellis is Meloy’s wife, and her album art is as crucial to the Decemberists’ identity as any of their early songs about castaways, cutouts, and homesick legionnaires.) The drawings were extraordinary, but the text — while unsurprisingly playful — was also tropey and wanting, and the wanting came in waves.

The visuals are exponentially more expansive and nuanced in this “Wildwood.” The writing is not. It is often charming though. It is dark. Very dark. Even by the standards of the animation studio behind “Coraline” and “Paranorman.” (Parents should be advised that the PG-13 rating is there for a reason from the first scene, even though I suspect this film will be broadly enjoyable for most older kids.) And, for a time, it is obviously — inimitably — the work of Laika, if only because no other studio would ever love Portland this much.

Teenage Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), however, seems kind of over the hippie Never-never Land of it all. She rolls her eyes at her dad’s plant collection, and his juvenile bedtime stories about the “Impassable Wilderness” on the other side of The St. John’s Bridge, and probably also his beloved red beanie when he isn’t looking. (Mr. McKeel is voiced by a sweetly pained Jake Johnson.) Prue barely even acknowledges the guy riding a unicycle past her local coffee shop while playing the bagpipes from under a Darth Vader mask. It’s time for her to put childlike things aside. Things like her underdeveloped friendship with the nerdy Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay), a lovably round-faced dork who’s still obsessed with playing tabletop fantasy games where he pretends to be a hero.

It’s Curtis who Prue (literally) bumps into when she takes her baby brother Mac downtown against her parents’ wishes, and it’s Curtis who’s there when a murder of computer-generated crows — more like a massacre, given their numbers — scoop Mac up and fly him toward the forest on the other side of the Willamette River. “There are places in the world people were never meant to go,” is what Mr. McKeel has always said about those woods, and sure enough Prue and Curtis have barely just biked there across the foggy train tracks before they’re beset upon by a fascistic talking coyote voiced by Tom Waits, the most loyal of the many animals that a grief-mad dowager governess named Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) has conscripted into her uncertain war against the realm.

Does she want to rule the Impassable Woods, or does she want to destroy them? Her intentions remain as difficult to parse as her plan for executing them (which has something to do with seizing control over a sentient and powerful breed of ivy), but it’s more important that Alexandra’s demented pathos allows her to be Jadis, Sarumon, and the Evil Queen from “Snow White” all at once, as her pain has soured the special love she felt for her late son into a more generic fixation with cheating death, or at least commanding it under her control. Mulligan sells the governess’ heartbreak and madness with every poison-tipped word, but her character’s struggle to negotiate between the five stages of grief is entombed within a fantasy saga that has a similarly hard time of harnessing its obsessions.

“Wildwood” is a mind-boggling visual smorgasbord on a scale that Laika has never attempted before, but the brilliance and density of its design can’t help but call attention to the ordinariness of its storytelling. While the movie is far too lovingly crafted to ever flatline altogether, a vertiginous discomfort kicks in after Curtis and Prue are split up (he’s forced to fight in the dowager governess’ army, while she’s imprisoned by the human bureaucrats she asks for help), as the singular genius infused into each frame seldom extends to the alchemy between them.

Individual sequences are incredible, Prue’s escape from the bureaucrats’ mansion chief among them, every new detail we learn about the Impassable Woods — and every new creature we meet within them — makes the film’s world seem less worthy of Laika’s painstaking attention. I adored the flamboyantly theatrical Owl Rex (instant “Celebrity Traitors” legend Richard E. Grant), and then felt betrayed that his only purpose was to establish Alexandra’s backstory. I was delighted to hear Mahershala Ali in the role of a bandit king named Brendan, and then disappointed that his character is reduced to a stock archetype in the fight against Alexandra.

Elsewhere, “Wildwood” makes slightly more surprising use of go-to voice actors Charlie Day and Awkwafina than most of the many animated movies they’ve been slotted into before, but it’s hard to shake the sense that Laika’s most ambitious project so far is also hedging its bets by stealing a page from “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Angry Birds 2.” So it goes in a film whose heroine — and whose studio — are both struggling to bridge the gap between kid sensibilities and more adult concerns, and yet there’s little beyond such meta-textual flourishes to help shape Prue’s journey of self-discovery, which is diluted into tedium by the parade of enchanted trees, friendly rats, and fearsome warriors she meets along the way. All the 3D-printed faces in the world can’t stop these characters from feeling two-dimensional, and the film’s strained efforts to fit Meloy’s novel into the stuff of an 131-minute story force Knight and co. to make compromises that “Wildwood” can only survive on the strength of its abundant wonder.

Despite his ample screentime as a co-lead, Curtis is nevertheless the most obvious victim of those compromises; while he makes sense as a counterweight to Prue’s headlong precociousness, he’s also never given much of his own reason to exist. A more adult film, or at least one more capable of exploring the life-long negotiation between holding on and letting go might have brought Prue’s mom (Maya Erskine) and dad to the fore after a mid-story revelation complicates their own relationship with magical thinking, but even that bombshell plot twist proves something of a dud in a movie that shares the McKeels’ struggle to split the difference between imagination and reality — a movie that strains to honor both sides of the equation, and ultimately serves neither to their fullest extent.

As tactile as it is dependent upon the sorcery of illusion, Laika’s brand of stop-motion animation is the ideal medium for transmuting that struggle into art. Perhaps that’s why the studio’s new reliance upon computer trickery — courtesy of a collaboration with Wētā FX — feels more like more of a symptom of Prue’s crisis than part of the solution to it. 670 of the movie’s 2,804 shots have been augmented by CGI, many of them too obviously to ignore. That’s not because the effects work is glaringly obvious (much of it is seamlessly woven into Laika’s signature look), but rather because it’s impossible. The film’s digital environments, cannon explosions, marching coyote armies, and soaring walls of wild ivy all fly in the face of what human hands can do, to the point that the movie’s most impressive scenes are partially deflated by the uncanniness of their creation.

Only partially, of course. Just as courage doesn’t mean the absence of fear, and growing up doesn’t mean leaving every trace of childhood astonishment behind, a trite story and a few digital embellishments don’t mean that “Wildwood” isn’t a rare spectacle worth savoring, or that Laika has somehow lost its way. Indeed, the film almost seems to deliberately court these defects, as if to focus its audience on appreciating the beauty that survives them. As one particularly wizened character tells Prue it: “You’re so intent on seeing no magic in the world, but you miss it in every blade of grass and budding flower.” To watch a Laika movie, even — or especially — this one, is to rediscover that magic everywhere you look.