Wendell & Wild

Nobody understands how to exploit the unearthly beauty of stop motion animation better than director Henry Selick.  In films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline, he has crafted macabre dream-like images that are not just astonishing to look at, but have true heart and meaning behind them.  His latest feature, Wendel & Wild (his first film in 13 years, due to a failed project with Pixar that went nowhere), finds him at the top of his game visually, but the heart and maturity I have come to expect is missing.

Here is a movie that combines wondrous images, such as an underworld nightmare carnival and dream-like visions acted out with detailed cut out figures, with a story so overstuffed yet oddly underwritten, I found myself enthralled and uninterested at the same time.  I was loving the technique on display so much, I almost want to recommend you watch it for them alone.  But then, just as I was getting into it, that convoluted storyline kept on rearing its ugly head.  The story is based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay Mcleod Chapman, and has been adapted by Selick and Jordan Peele, who reunites here with his comedy partner, Keegan-Michael Key, for the first time in years as the titular duo, a pair of demons who are more like a comedy team, which probably is not surprising.

And yet, they are not the central focus here, as Wendel and Wild are mainly here for comic relief.  Instead the movie tells the story of Kat (voice by Lyric Ross), a sour and rebellious 13-year-old girl who is haunted by the death of her parents, and believes she is responsible.  This has led to a life of pushing others away and bad decisions, and has dropped her into a run down boarding school in her dying hometown of Rust Bank.  There, she meets a few of the other local kids, creates a few guarded relationships ("Everyone who gets close to me dies".), and finds out that she is a Hell Maiden, and can directly communicate with demons of the Underworld.

This is particularly of interest to Wendel and Wild, two demon brothers who want to escape from their controlling father Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), and start their own demonic amusement park up on Earth.  They trick her into helping them, because they have magical hair cream that can raise the dead, and potentially return Kat's parents back to the land of the living.  If the movie was just about Kat's emotional journey, I could get behind it, but the plot never gets to stand out, because it's constantly being crowded by more subplots than any one movie needs, including a sinister plot by a pair of greedy corporate twits who are slowly destroying the town, and caused a deadly fire that led to the town going downhill in the first place, the efforts to save the town, a plot to raise the dead, and one of the teachers at the boarding school named Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) also being a Hell Maiden, and teaching Kat how to grow into her powers and believe in herself.

All of these plots and side characters give Wendell & Wild an overly bloated tone that killed whatever enjoyment the visuals were able to provide.  It turns what could be a powerful story about grief and emotional trauma into something that simply can't settle on a proper tone, because each plot and character seems to exist in a completely different film.  The kids at the school seem to come from a tween sitcom, the evil corporate characters are broad parody villains, the whole raising the dead plot brings memories of the horror-themed Coraline, and Wendell and Wild themselves mainly seem to be on the outside of the story doing a Key and Peele comedy routine.  There's even a cute little pet goat for one of the kids for no reason other than perhaps appealing to young kids. 

This is a movie that has a lot on its mind, and I admire that, but it needs to connect better for it to seem like a cohesive whole.  The movie's combination of the macabre, social commentary on wealth divide and the prison system, female empowerment and sketch comedy simply ends up being a mess.  You can see the effort that went into creating the visuals and the world, but the story ends up crashing it all down.  I wanted to get behind the lead character Kat, as she has an interesting character design and a potentially interesting arc.  But because it's never exploited to its fullest, having to compete with everything else the movie wants to say, it ends up being less than it should.  

Wendel & Wild is a movie that is easy for me to admire, yet hard to enjoy.  I'm sure it was a thrill for Selick just to be working again after the problems he had getting his Pixar project off the ground, which almost led to him quitting filmmaking.  I fully support his vision, but he needs a central idea to guide it, and this film simply goes in too many directions.

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