Wendell and Wild drops us into a handcrafted world of demonic fun fairs, austere religious academies, and snowy graveyards where the dead wait for resurrection. Bringing it all to life is director Henry Selick, whose films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline have cemented him as a legend in the world of stop-motion animation.
Wendell and Wild marks Selick's first feature film in 13 years, and what a return it proves to be. From the surreal Scream Fair held on the belly of a massive demon to main character Kat's (voiced by Lyric Ross) Afro-punk outfits, each element of Wendell and Wild is packed with an astounding amount of care and detail. Every second of the movie is proof of the power of stop motion: You truly see the human effort that went into telling this story.
That emphasis on the work of the animators was extra important to Selick coming into Wendell and Wild. "Since Coraline till now, which is 13 years, I think a lot of stop motion has gotten a little too perfect, too CG-like," Selick told Mashable in a video interview. "Me and the animation supervisors for this — Jeff Riley and Malcolm Lamont — we wanted to pull it back to feel more handmade, to make it very clear that this was touched by human hands directly, and didn't go through all these other steps. The animators literally shaped these characters a frame at a time and breathe a performance into them."
The bespoke quality of this technique presents itself in different ways throughout Wendell and Wild. The attractions at the Scream Fair and the damned souls who ride them look as if they've been cut from paper, and several flashback sequences evoke shadow puppetry. Many characters — especially demons Wendell (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (voiced by Jordan Peele) — look like drawings come to life thanks to their exaggerated features.
Perhaps most noticeable are the seams along characters' faces, which are crucial to the animation process. Selick and his team use a technique called "replacement animation," where you make multiple versions of part of a puppet, say an arm or a leg. To capture different actions, you replace parts of the puppet with these various iterations. For The Nightmare Before Christmas, animators replaced Jack Skellington's entire head for different expressions. In Coraline, faces were split in half.
"We figured if we split the face into upper and lower halves, then we can have different combinations of brows and squinted eyes with different mouths, and we'd have a lot more variety," said Selick.
Splitting the characters' faces meant that seams were involved in Coraline, too. Selick fought to include them, but "the studio, Laika, was too freaked out about showing them," he said. Now, though, in Wendell and Wild, the face seams are on full display as proof of Selick, Riley, and Lamont's desire to return to the hand-hewn.
What some might call imperfections, Selick calls charm. "Whenever there was a mistake [in the movie], I'd be asked, 'Well, is this charm or a mistake?' If it was a really big mistake, then it's a mistake, and we would fix it," Selick explained. "But most of the time it was stop-motion charm. And you know, I think it's a real thing."
For example, the head demon Buffalo Belzer (voiced by Ving Rhames) doesn't have as wide a range of facial expressions as characters like Kat. As Selick describes it, "His face pops from expression to expression, and not very smoothly. It's not so much a mistake as we limited his range a lot, and yet, I think it still works for his character."
These moments of charm populate Wendell and Wild with the humanity and proof of artistry that Selick wanted, and that even shines through in the film's credits and post-credit scene. As the credits roll, we see footage of the creation of the film's massive puppets and set pieces, serving as an ode both to the team who brought Wendell and Wild to life and to the art of stop motion in general. Brimming with hand-crafted artistry and, yes, plenty of charm, Wendell and Wild is a treat for any animation aficionado.
Wendell & Wild is now streaming on Netflix.
