Wildwood (2026)

Despite being warned to keep her baby brother indoors, "Prue" takes him out on a trip around town and he gets pinched by a menacing murder of crows and taken deep into the impenetrable forest. She's determined to get him back and so sets off into the dark and forbidding woods where she quickly encounters the coyotes - the guards of the "Dowager Governess". Captured and taken to her castle, she is promised assistance in retrieving her sibling but just how trustworthy is this outwardly benign lady? For that matter, what about the marauding "Brendan" and…

While I have enjoyed Laika's works in the past (I still have yet to watch Kubo and the Two Strings), I have considered them my least favorite animation studio-or at least, one of them. And that is not the fault of the studio itself. Sometimes the animation style just doesn't make any sense for the movie. For example, The Boxtrolls has some genuinely clever stop motion animation, but I always felt like Mr. Gristle's creepy facial expressions clashed with the movie's comical tone, even with Tracy Morgan's maniacal vocal performance. Similarly, I felt…

A Defiant Handcrafted Miracle in an Age of Plastic Cinema There is a moment early in Wildwood when the Pacific Northwest sun filters through a canopy of moss draped Douglas firs, catching the frayed thread of Prue McKeel’s knit sweater and the subtle, microscopic wobble of miniature resin leaves. You can practically smell the rain-soaked soil. In an era where cinema is increasingly assembled inside sterile server racks, seeing actual physical matter sculpted, painted, dressed, and nudged twenty-four times a second by human hands feels less like…