Wildwood Movie Review: Laika has not released a feature since Missing Link in 2019, and for a while it was fair to wonder whether the studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings would ever make another one. Wildwood is the answer, and it is not a modest one. Directed by Travis Knight, it runs 132 minutes, which makes it the longest stop-motion feature ever made, and it arrived in Indian cinemas on 23 October 2026 through PVR INOX Pictures.
This Wildwood review is spoiler-free beyond the opening act. Here is where I land: it is the most beautiful film in theatres right now, a little too long, a lot darker than the word “animated” suggests, and worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find.
Wildwood at a Glance
- Director: Travis Knight
- Screenplay: Chris Butler, from the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy, illustrated by Carson Ellis
- Voice cast: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Richard E. Grant, Tom Waits, Charlie Day, Tantoo Cardinal, Jake Johnson, Maya Erskine, Amandla Stenberg
- Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
- Music: Dario Marianelli
- Runtime: 2 hours 12 minutes
- Certificate: UA in India (listings); PG-13 in the US, Laika’s first
- India release: 23 October 2026, in English, via PVR INOX Pictures
The Story, Without Spoilers
Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is twelve, restless and bored of her gentle, slightly over-careful parents in Portland, Oregon. Her baby brother Mac is never allowed out of the house, and nobody will quite explain why. The one afternoon she is left in charge, she ignores that rule, takes him to a playground, and watches a flock of crows lift him into the sky.
The crows head for the Impassable Wilderness, the forest on the edge of town that locals are told never to enter. Prue goes in anyway, with her awkward classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) tagging along. Inside is a whole hidden country of rival factions: coyotes in red military coats, a principality of enormous birds, bandits in the deep woods, and a grief-stricken Dowager Governess, Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), who seems to be at the centre of every bad thing happening there.
That is the setup. What follows is a rescue mission that keeps widening into something closer to a war story.
Also read: Klara and the Sun Review: Jenna Ortega Shines in Taika Waititi’s Uneven Ishiguro Adaptation
The Craft: Why You Should See It on a Big Screen
Every stop-motion film is an act of stubbornness. Each frame is a puppet nudged by hand, photographed, and nudged again. Wildwood takes that stubbornness to a scale that is hard to wrap your head around: the Los Angeles Times counts 233 handcrafted puppets and 132 practical sets, with New Zealand’s Wētā FX helping on digital environments and effects.
You feel that labour in the small things. Feathers move individually. Fur has texture you almost want to touch. A coyote’s snarl has a slightly different set of teeth from the coyote next to him. The Portland scenes are cluttered with tiny jokes on shop signs that reward a second viewing. When the film opens up into the forest, with ivy creeping across whole sectors and a giant golden eagle filling the frame, it is genuinely breathtaking.
Caleb Deschanel, the veteran cinematographer of The Black Stallion and six-time Oscar nominee, shoots stop-motion here for the first time, and his lighting is a big part of why the film looks so rich. Dusk actually feels like dusk. Night in the woods feels cold.
Dario Marianelli’s score borrows from folk strings and military drums without drowning the picture, and the Decemberists, Colin Meloy’s band, turn up on the soundtrack too.
The Voice Cast
Carey Mulligan is the standout. Alexandra could easily have been a stock wicked queen, but Mulligan plays her as someone hollowed out by loss, and the screenplay gives her a reason for her cruelty that you understand even while you are horrified by it. It is the best villain in a Laika film since the Other Mother.
Peyton Elizabeth Lee gives Prue a believable edge: impatient, a bit unkind to Curtis at first, and braver than she knows. Jacob Tremblay gets the more surprising arc, and the Curtis storyline, particularly his friendship with Awkwafina’s sardonic rat Septima, ends up as one of the film’s sweetest threads.
The supporting roster is stacked. Angela Bassett brings authority to the eagle known as the General. Mahershala Ali is warm and gruff as Brendan, the Bandit King. Richard E. Grant, as an owl in a waistcoat, gets some of the driest laughs. Tom Waits, as the fanatical coyote officer Maksim, sounds exactly as gravelly and unhinged as you would hope.
Where It Stumbles
It is long. Two hours and twelve minutes is a lot of film for a story whose bones are a classic fairy tale: a lost child, a grieving queen, a forest that tests the hero. Some side plots feel like they were kept because they were too lovely to cut, not because the story needed them, and the middle stretch sags a little as the factions multiply.
The story itself is also more familiar than the visuals. Meloy’s novel borrows openly from Narnia, Tolkien and Labyrinth, and the film inherits that. Not every critic has been charmed: the Associated Press found it overly violent and felt the technology outstripped the story. I do not agree with the second half of that, but I understand it.
Is It Okay for Kids?
This is the question most Indian parents will have, because “animated film in PVR” usually means a safe family outing. Wildwood is not that, at least not for small children. It is Laika’s first PG-13 film in the US, and there is real menace from the opening scene onward: the crow abduction is genuinely scary, there are battles with casualties, and grief sits at the centre of the story. For children around twelve and up who liked Coraline, it will probably become a favourite. For a five-year-old, maybe wait.
How It’s Doing
In the US, Wildwood opened to $11.6 million over its first weekend, beating tracking that topped out around $10 million and roughly doubling Missing Link’s start. It earned an A CinemaScore and an 85 on Metacritic, and Gold Derby’s box office report noted a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score that weekend. If you are weighing it against other Hollywood options in multiplexes this week, our Clayface review covers the very different, very R-rated alternative.
Verdict: Overlong and occasionally overstuffed, but Wildwood is handmade cinema at a scale nobody else attempts, with a superb Carey Mulligan and images you will remember for years. Rating: 4/5
