Wendell & Wild: sublimely animated stop-motion chaos

The subconscious is never far below the surface in Henry Selick’s films, whose characters pass easily between waking and other states. When 13-year-old Kat, the traumatised orphan at the heart of the stop-motion feature Wendell & Wild, learns that she can commune with her ‘personal’ demons in the underworld, she may be surprised – but fans of the director won’t be.

Kat has been grappling with demons of a figurative kind ever since she lost her parents in an accident in which she feels complicit. Her sense of guilt, the film implies, has been magnified by her experiences in the juvenile justice system, into which she was later flung after getting into trouble. The offer of a place at a girls’ boarding school, made as part of a scheme to rehabilitate young offenders, promises a new start. But the motivations behind the scheme turn out to be less than holy: the oily Catholic priest who runs the school is in league with the devious Klaxes, developers of private prisons who want to open an institution nearby. They are suspected of an arson attack on a local brewery that has gutted the town, emptying it of jobs and people.

Meanwhile, a literal ghost town teems below. The underworld is home to a ghoulish miniature carnival of departed souls, whimsically overseen by demon-lord Buffalo Belzer (who could almost be a stop-motion director admiring his set). His offspring Wendell and Wild desperately want to redesign the funfair, but Belzer will have none of it. Having made contact with Kat, their personal ‘hellmaiden’, the pair embark on a hare-brained scheme to find backing for their project in the land of the living.

The paragraphs above may be exposition-heavy, but then so is the film. Drawing on an unpublished book he co-authored with Clay McLeod Chapman, Selick wrote the screenplay with Jordan Peele (Get Out, 2017; Nope, 2022). Their script careens from one incident to the next, even as it buckles under the weight of its vast cast and innumerable ideas. The giddy Grand Guignol of the underworld is pure Selick: the comatose Stu in Monkeybone (2001) and the sleeping Coraline in the 2009 feature of that name visit similar worlds. Wendell and Wild are voiced by Peele and his long-time comedic collaborator Keegan-Michael Key, and their goofy wise-guy-dumb-guy routine is perfect suited to the caricatural puppets of Selick and character designer Pablo Lobato.

Peele is adept at harnessing genre conventions to sophisticated sociopolitical commentary. His mark is felt in the segments set in the land of the living, which touch on a range of timely issues. A trans boy in a key supporting role is misgendered and deadnamed. The town, significantly named Rust Bank, stands in for a swathe of America suffering industrial decline. The story is haunted by the rapid expansion of the private prison sector, though the racial injustice of the penal system is somewhat obscured here by the fact that one of the Klaxes, Trumpian toupee notwithstanding, is Black. (Curiously, the Klaxes are also British, Union Jack insignia and all.) It is rare for mainstream animated films to be this specifically political.

Ultimately, though, the film spreads itself too thin. Fun is had with the conceit of personal demons as corporeal creatures, and there is a pleasing symmetry between Wendell and Wild’s pet design project and Kat’s path to catharsis: reviving the town. Yet her relationship with her demons – the film’s emotional trunk – cannot develop properly amid the entanglements of the plot. The chance this device presents to deeply explore her inner life is squandered; the fact that the demons have (arbitrary) motives of their own confuses the metaphor. There are simply too many characters with too many agendas – a mistake no previous Selick film has made.

A word on the visuals. Cinephiles can sometimes fetishise stop-motion, praising it as somehow more authentic or aesthetic than computer-generated animation without really arguing why; but it can certainly be said that the technique enables design work that contrasts with the hoary archetypes of CG animation. Sure enough, Wendell & Wild is simply a parade of fascinating character designs – a masterclass in shape language, from the globular nuns to the Picasso-esque souls of the dead. The animation itself is sublime throughout, avoiding the mechanical pose-to-pose rhythm that bedevils a lot of stop-motion. The film is wonderful to watch, even when it’s tiring to follow.

► Wendell & Wild is in UK cinemas now.