2023 is upon us, and I’m sure many of you have already taken every chance you can to watch all the new releases. Me? I’m still stuck in 2022, catching up on an endless string of films that slipped me by. One of those is a big one though, and its name is Wendell and Wild. This stop-motion dark fantasy film debuted on Netflix in October and marks the long-awaited return of Henry Selick, a man who should be well-known in my parish for directing Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, two of my favourite animated films and films in general. I’ve reviewed both of them before, and recent rewatches have only cemented them as films that sparked my love of animation and my passion for writing about film, so you can bet that I was covering this sooner or later.
Was it worth the thirteen-year wait? Well, we’ll return to this question later on, but safe to say that Henry Selick showed up to play for his first film in over a decade. There is a lot going on in Wendell and Wild, and it’s full of Selick’s trademark wacky fantasy ideas. I do pick up some similarities with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, but I admire that Selick keeps this film feeling fresh rather than a tired rehash of his greatest hits. This could also be a result of his collaboration with Jordan Peele, who co-wrote Wendell & Wild alongside Selick.
I was a little worried when I saw Peele’s involvement. Not because I think he is bad by any means, but since both he and Selick have their own distinct visions, I was worried that this would be a clash of styles. Luckily, I was wrong. Selick’s fondness for dark fantasy is on show here, but it feels more grounded in reality thanks to Peele. It’s also interesting to know that Peele was attached to collaborate even before his directorial breakthrough with Get Out. Clearly, Selick trusted him with breathing life into this project, and even if Jordan Peele has directed three films between him signing on to Wendell & Wild and it actually coming out, it’s good to know that the two really enjoyed working together and made something collaboratively that they were proud of.
Peele is also joined by his former comedic sidekick Keegan Michael-Key to voice the titular duo Wendell & Wild, a pair of demons whose main job is to tend to their father, Buffalo Belzer, this film’s version of the devil. To use a comparison to a previous Selick film, Wendell & Wild are the Sally to Buffalo Belzer’s Dr Finklestein. They are certainly fun and conniving characters, and Key and Peele are a dynamic voice duo as ever, but I do think naming the film after these two characters is something of a stretch. We spend more time with Kat and her navigating through her dark past than we actually do with a duo who are essentially the film’s comic reliefs.
Selick has always been a stop-motion master, but funnily enough, the style he adopts here reminds me more of The Nightmare Before Christmas and the animated segments of James & The Giant Peach. Coraline was clearly going for a style that Laika would later run with, being slicker and more polished, while Wendell and Wild’s designs are suitably strange and morbid.
The film has a higher rating of 12 than the PG received by Selick’s previous animated work, and I don’t know whether this was an intentional choice or the BBFC just didn’t think it would get away with a PG, but regardless, I love that this enabled Selick to loosen his restraints and get even weirder. Some of the imagery at the start, with Buffalo Belzer throwing demon souls in a pot and incinerating them, is that deliciously dark imagery that I love seeing in stop-motion since it looks far scarier in this form than it ever would with just computer graphics.
Wendell & Wild had everything in it that a stop-motion fan like me loves to see, and the exploration of dark and morbid concepts is something that we need to see far more often.
It’s not just the animation that’s dark though as both Selick and Peele imbue the first forty minutes or so with an unrelenting bleakness. The backstory presented is one that feels like a black comedy in a way. Not only has the life of our main character Kat gone off the rails, but it’s also gone flying off a bridge – quite literally in this case as Kat’s parents die in a car crash with her in the car, and she later lives out an entire troubled life of being sent to school after school and getting into trouble with the law. I’ve got no idea why the entire catalyst for the film’s plot is a two-headed worm that is never mentioned again, but the start of the film is so effectively dark and miserable that I can forgive the downright bizarre mechanics the plot takes to get there.
It has to be said that Wendell and Wild is a flawed film. The collaboration between Selick and Peele is one that brings out fantastic results but it also leads to a script full of ideas, so full that it can’t help but feel overstuffed. It’s Selick’s longest film at 106 minutes, and while that’s long by the standards of most 2+ hour blockbusters, it means that the film inevitably suffers from being stretched a bit thin as we get near the conclusion.
There are three main plot strands here, and the film could’ve done with ditching one in particular, which is the focus on a large company called Klax Korp which deals in the building of private prisons. It wasn’t bad by any means, but the two villainous characters who run Klax Korp feel like they’re in a different film from everyone else. The first scene with these two is especially chilling, but the initial menace established here fades pretty quickly, and the film gets a little too bogged down in social commentary as we head towards the climax. I’m all for social commentary, especially when this is dealing with such a prevalent theme like the privatisation of public institutions, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs in the macabre comedy-horror that every other character is in.
That said, for a project that has been in development for over a decade, headed by a critically-acclaimed director, this film is anything but a disappointment. Wendell & Wild had everything in it that a stop-motion fan like me loves to see, and the exploration of dark and morbid concepts is something that we need to see far more often. Henry Selick has other projects in the pipeline and judging by the time it took for him to make this God knows when those will see the light of day, but Wendell & Wild is all the proof you need that Selick does not waste his time; he pours his heart and soul into films that are unique, layered and memorable. It’s an overdue present, but I am very happy indeed to receive it.
This isn’t my review, however, I would kick myself if I didn’t mention the amazing soundtrack Wendell & Wild has put together. The Specials, X-Ray Spex, Death, Living Color, on top of compositions by Bruno Coulais, Wendell & Wild introduces a new generation to punk rock and I’m all here for it. Especially Death, that all-black proto-punk band from the early 1970s deserves all the recognition in the world.
EDITORWENDELL & WILD IS AVAILABLE TO WATCH NOW ON NETFLIX
