Wendell & Wild review: Stunning stop-motion animation can’t save Key and Peele horror aimed at kids

Wendell and Wild is a twisted stop-motion animation that looks beautiful, but the jaw-dropping imagery is in service of a story that’s too often confused and convoluted.

Having helmed the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, writer-director Harry Selick is no stranger to the macabre, his stories frequently revolving around death and the afterlife.

Wendell & Wild follows in those morbid footsteps, Selick teaming up with new master of horror Jordan Peele to tell a tale of demons, zombies, and a teenage girl with magical powers.

But while that sounds exciting, the result is oftentimes uninspiring, with the film getting bogged down in detail about funding, budgets, picket lines, and council votes. Which isn’t the stuff of classic family fare.

Early trauma

The film starts in deeply traumatic fashion. The Elliots are driving their young daughter Kat home from the brewery they own in a place called Rust Bank, when she bites into a toffee apple, sees something horrible, and screams.

That scream momentarily distracts her father, who drives the car off a bridge and into the water beneath. With some help from mum, Kat swims to safety, but Mr and Mrs Elliot sink and drown.

Via voiceover, Kat explains that she thought she’d hate herself for the rest of her life, and probably would’ve were it not for the arrival two demons named Wendell and Wild.

What is Wendell & Wild about?

But we’ll get to them later, as while Wendell and Wild are the title characters – and voiced by stars Peele and Keegan-Michael Key – this is Kat’s story. We jump five years ahead, during which time she’s been in and out of trouble. But Kat gets a second change, at a fancy girl’s school, as part of a scheme called “Break the Cycle.”

Trouble is, the school is back in Rust Bank, bringing Kat’s horrific childhood memories to the surface. And all is not well in town, with the brewery burning down during her parents’ memorial, and the loss of that business having a knock-on effect that effectively killed everything else.

Aside from Klax Korp that is, a company that oversees private prisons, and seems to succeed the more that Rust Bank fails. What does that have to do with Kat Elliott? Or the paralegal fighting to retain her house and feed her son? Or the Padre struggling to keep the school open? Or big Buffalo Belzer and his Scream Fair? Not enough, to be honest, with the film becoming ever-more cumbersome as it endeavors to connect all the disparate narrative threads.

Meet Wendell & Wild

Kat – voiced by Lyric Ross, and with a punk aesthetic that matches the movie’s soundtrack – struggles at school initially, failing to make friends, and falling out with the priest and nuns who run the place. But then strange phenomena start happening all around her. She knows a brick is falling before it drops. She receives a bite which leaves a mark that has huge consequences. And she learns something about herself that opens up a world of possibilities.

Those possibilities begin with Kat summoning those aforementioned demons to the land of the living on the promise of a lie, which comes as a relief to Wendell and Wild as they’re in trouble down there for treason, insurrection, and eating their boss’s hair cream.

This arrival should be the moment the movie fully takes flight, as the mischievous demons have bags of comic potential. But Wendell and Wild aren’t nearly as interesting or funny as the movie thinks, in spite of Key and Peele’s collective talents. Making their appearance in our world something of an anti-climax that helps to further the plot, but doesn’t add anything meaningful to the film.

Selick’s stunning stop-motion

Mercifully, some stunning stop-motion is on display to make up for the narrative shortcomings, with Wendell & Wild’s animation comparable to Selick’s wondrous past endeavours.

A montage where the dead are raised is filled with clever visual gags, quickly followed by hilarious shots of their skeletal forms back in their homes, a reminder of how masterfully Selick fills a frame.

While the standout sequence finds Kat facing personal demons by seeing her past projected on a stone wall in glowing green. As memories transform into monsters – her metaphors made real – the scene culminates in Kat roaring, “I’m in control of my life now – not you.”

It’s powerful stuff – the perfect marriage of form and theme – and makes one wish that more of the film were in this vein.

Connecting Wendell & Wild to Get Out

Among the movie’s many storylines is one that connects Wendell & Wild to Jordan Peele’s debut movie, Get Out. In that film, ‘The Sunken Place’ is representative of many things, one of them being the Prison Industrial Complex, a system that both silences and suppresses minorities.

Where there it was metaphor, here’s it’s front and center, with Klax Korp owners Lane and Irmgard Klaxon (David Harewood and Maxine Peake) overfilling prisons where the conditions are dangerous, the food terrible, and the potential for rehabilitation non-existent. All to turn a profit.

The film even ends with a battle on the site of their next prison, our heroes literally smashing that industrial complex via a deeply weird – but hugely entertaining – action sequence. Which shows noble intent on the film’s part, but remains a strange way to end a children’s movie.

The Verdict: Is Wendell & Wild good?

Wendell and Wild starts in promising fashion. A little dark, sure, but with an intriguing set-up, focusing on a compelling protagonist. But then it gets mired in plots that have no business being in a story aimed at youngsters. A bit like the time those space movies became overly concerned with trade routes.

Kat’s tale is solid, a sort of superhero origin story that’s really about unburdening yourself from guilt and regret. While the animation is superb – maybe the best that Selick has produced, and if not, certainly the most visually inventive.

Wendell & Wild Score: 6/10

But ultimately Wendell & Wild is so overstuffed with characters and plot that it crumbles under the weight of its own ambition; an adult story trapped in a kid’s film that will likely satisfy neither party.

Wendell & Wild streams on Netflix from October 28.