It’s a shame when someone thinks of The nightmare before Christmas, they think of Tim Burton. Henry Selick – that’s who to think. Selcik continued making James and the Big Peachthe underrated Brendan Fraser movie monkey legand the beloved but scary children’s movie Coraline. It’s been 13 years since that last film, seven of which were spent developing and making his new project, the absolutely mesmerizing Wendell & Wild.
Co-written with Jordan Peele and starring an incredible cast of voices including Keegan-Michael Key, Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett, James Hong, Ving Rhames, Tamara Smart and many more, the Netflix movie Wendell & Wild is a beautifully animated, highly imaginative and surprisingly soulful film, and arguably the absolute best animated film of the year.
Henry Selick follows Coraline with the Great Wendell & Wild
Lyric Ross plays Kat Elliot, a girl who lost her parents at a very young age. Since then, she has been in and out of foster care, developing insecurities and anger, and being sent to juvenile detention centers for defending herself against bullies. She’s an angry young woman who went through the system and suffered severe scarring as a result, but now gets what some call “a chance” to change her life through a program called Break the Cycle. Returning to her hometown, the program places her in a Catholic school for mostly affluent students.
With their dress code uniforms and perky demeanor, the kids at her new school are hardly bad people, but they are rather vapid (Kat calls them “prize poodles”). Kat, on the other hand, dyes her hair green, wears studded knee-high boots, and blasts killer punk rock from her dad’s boombox. Little does she know that soon two demons will give her the chance to bring her dead parents back to life. That boombox mentioned above uses a bloodshot eye to the circular stereo, which is an indication of the meticulous care and thoughtful design that goes into every moment of Wendell & Wild.
Selick, who is arguably the greatest stop-motion animation director outside of Aardman today, has put a tremendous amount of love into the film’s character design and world-building. By filming at fewer frames per second than average, along with cropped animation, silhouette animation and a bit of CGI, Selick creates a visually stunning world with Wendell & Wild, one that rivals virtually any stop-motion film in recent memory. Each character is so beautifully specific and each set here is so perfectly colored and built, but all without the blindingly clear, busy and simplistic CGI of most animations.
Wendell & Wild has demons and Hell Maidens, but is kid friendly
Some of the best animations in Wendell & Wild comes when Selick takes us to hell. It’s a bit spooky, extremely inventive, but also hilarious, and where we meet the titular demon brothers Wendell (played by Key) and Wild (played by Peele). As a result of trying to design a better version of Hell, they are sentenced to some sort of prison on their father’s head. Their father is a giant demon going bald, so they dig into his scalp and bury hair cream in the holes. However, they discover that this rejuvenating hair cream may have the power to raise the dead.
Kat, perhaps as a result of her immense childhood trauma, is actually a Hell Maiden. She has the power to summon and communicate with demons (a literal manifestation of her own personal one), so Wendell and Wild make a deal with her. When she summons them to the real world, where they can fulfill their own dreams and escape from their hair-plug prison, they will raise her parents from the dead. It’s a deal, but of course nothing is easy when you make deals with the devil (or even two bumbling, crazy little devils like this one).
Some of these can be a little spooky, but it’s really up to each parent to decide if this is right for their kids. A good litmus test is being thought Nightmare before Christmas and Coraline – if they were good, they certainly are. Even double, given the social and moral messages.
Ross is wonderful as Kat, who grows up feeling guilty about her parents’ deaths, and suffers the consequences of years spent in the horrible systems of foster care, juvenile detention centers and low-income schools. When she returns to Rust Bank, where her new school is, she realizes that much of the city has suffered a similar fate since the death of her parents (whose brewery burned down, killing many and destroying the local economy). Instead, the Klaxon company has made its way to Rust Bank and hopes to build a private prison in the devastated area.
Wendell & Wild bases its plot on the school-to-jail pipeline
Believe it or not, this PG-13 movie delves much deeper into much more important themes than the usual “believe in yourself” tripe of most animated films. This is a funny, weird and silly movie that focuses more on the school-to-prison pipeline (especially for people of color) than any “serious” drama. In addition to the necessary themes such as family and friendship, Wendell & Wild also addresses guilt and grief, corporate greed, local political action, trans rights, and the public school system, all without being “educational” or preaching. Admittedly, there’s a lot going on here between all these themes, which might get complicated or too crowded for younger viewers, but it eventually comes together and works.
Apart from giving really valuable lessons about the real world, Wendell & Wild is filled with beautiful, recognizable and representative (albeit stop-motion) characters. Kat is, of course, the best, a fierce punk rocker whose fear has led to deep-seated misanthropy, but almost every character in this film is well-developed and multidimensional. The school principal (played by movie legend James Hong) is a weasel-like shallot, but in the end he just wants his school to survive. The spoiled rich kids are not mean, just ignorant, and when they realize what the evil fictional company is doing, they speak wisely.
There are almost no stereotypes or typical clichés in Wendell & Wild (apart from Klaxon’s evil, cunning corporate rulers, but these days, with billionaires literally trying to escape the Earth they destroy by building bunkers and flying to Mars, the shoe fits). These are generally realistic people in a world mirroring our own, and the film’s unexpectedly powerful call for local political action, and for people to stand up for their own communities, is extraordinary.
Wendell & Wild is now on Netflix, and it sounds and looks amazing
Key & Peele, together again, are lovely of course. The script is great, but they go above and beyond with their line readings; they alternate seamlessly throughout the movie between laughably funny, pathetically stupid, demonically intimidating and somehow cute. Angela Bassett is wonderful as well as a very wise older nun at Catholic school who takes Kat under her wing.
The music is great throughout, alternating between the beautiful, very cool score by Bruno Coulais and the occasional pop song, without ever feeling insanely cheesy (no montages set to I am a believer, for example). Some musical moments feel so out of the blue Nightmare before Christmasbut they all feel different in the end, especially if they mirror the largely BIPOC characters in the film.
Robert Anich edits what you imagine to be a huge amount of animation together in a streamlined, coherent way, and even if the ending is pinned a little too neatly, his editing makes it exciting. Peter Sorg’s cinematography makes the most of this beautiful animation, which Selick and chief designer Pablo Lobato have perfected. Overall, Wendell & Wild is surprisingly meaningful with a lot of depth and with a beautiful, extremely fun surface to boot.
Netflix Animation, Monkeypaw Productions, Gotham Group and Principato-Young Entertainment, Wendell & Wild is now on Netflix.