Wildwood (2026) Review - Laika’s Handmade Magnum Opus
Allow me to get straight to the point: Wildwood is not merely the best animated film of 2026 and one of the best films of the year. It’s one of the best animated films to come out in years.
Travis Knight directs, working from a screenplay by Chris Butler that adapts Colin Meloy’s 2011 fantasy novel. It is a decidedly PG-13 low fantasy epic in the tradition of The Chronicles of Narnia and Labyrinth, and it earns the rating. There is real danger here, and real grief, and it culminates in a war. Children old enough to handle it will be enchanted, and so will all of the adults who see it as well.
Prue McKeel, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, is a practical girl in Portland, Oregon, who believes she has outgrown magic. Her father tells her fairy tales about the Impassable Wilderness beyond their home, and she listens politely, the way a child of a certain age does when she has decided the stories are for someone younger. Then a murder of crows descends like a scene out of The Birds and carries her baby brother, Mac, off to the very woods her parents warned her about. The film does not waste time. One moment it is an ordinary morning, and the next a toddler has been abducted and his older sister must follow.
She is joined by her nerdy classmate Curtis, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, and together they enter a world of magic and talking animals. They arrive in the middle of an old conflict that is about to become a war, and like Prue, we are thrown into the wilderness with very little explanation and asked to find our footing. I admired that. The film trusts us to piece the world together as she does, and the confidence of that choice runs through the whole film.
The antagonist of the film is the dowager governess Alexandra, voiced by Carey Mulligan. It would have been easy to make her a straightforward evildoer, but Mulligan’s performance doesn’t allow it. She has been touched by unspeakable grief, and you feel the weight of it in every line. We do not forgive her, but we understand her, and that is what makes the story’s sorrow real. A children’s film that lets its villain be in mourning is a film that respects its audience.
The rest of the voice cast is just as well chosen. Angela Bassett plays the general of the Avian Principality, a nation of birds. Mahershala Ali plays the leader of the bandits. Awkwafina brings her particular energy to a lovable rat named Septima, and Richard E. Grant is Owl Rex, a dapper bird with a deeper understanding of the magic of this world. All give solid performances that make the film’s world feels populated rather than merely decorated.
Then there is the craft, which is staggering. Every frame of this film was made by human hands, and you can see it. The forests are built from real materials, including basalt, granite, aspen, and birch, and hundreds of costumes were crafted. The production used about 230 puppets across 132 sets, and more than 142,000 replacement faces give the characters a range of expression that feels almost limitless. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel lights these miniature worlds gorgeously, and the exaggerated expressions land because the light shapes them so lovingly.
I have thought often about how rare this is. We live in a time of franchises, reboots, and generative AI, and here is a film in which every character and environment was crafted by a person who cared how it looked. That is not just a technical achievement. It is the argument of the film itself. Prue discovers that magic is hiding in her everyday life, and the audience gets to rediscover that the magic of cinema lies in the labor and skill that make a movie a reality.
The world that Laika built is vast. Each location feels like its own country, lending a Tolkienesque scope to the geography and to the action. Even Portland is as convincingly drawn as the woods. When Prue pedals her bike downtown, landmarks such as Voodoo Doughnut appear along the way, small and affectionate cameos that ground the fantasy in a real city.
The film does not pretend that magic is safe. Even in a world of talking animals, there is blood and violence in war, and the story builds toward an extended battle sequence that recalls the climactic clashes of The Lord of the Rings. It is thrilling, but it is also sad, because by then we have come to care deeply about the people of this world.
This is where I think the film earns its place among the year’s best, and not only among animated films. It has the scale and ambition of a great fantasy, the emotional intelligence of a great drama, and the handmade beauty of an art form that insists on the human touch. Animated films are too often treated as a category, something for the children while the adults check their phones. Wildwood demands to be taken as cinema. It is for families, but it is also for anyone who remembers what it felt like to read a story and believe that the woods at the edge of town might hold something extraordinary.
Laika has long been one of the most daring studios in animation, and its earlier films were all wonderful. This one is the culmination of that ambition, and it stands as a reminder of the scale of artistry the studio is capable of. Its stop-motion world is not a nostalgic throwback but a living, breathing argument for the medium.
Wildwood is in theaters now. It runs just over two hours, and I would have happily stayed longer. Go and see it on the biggest screen you can find, and bring someone you love.