Post by Dracula on Nov 26, 2022 9:46:07 GMT -5
Wendell and Wild11/9/2022
Animation is often a difficult field to truly make a name in. Most animated films’ identities tend to be defined by the studios and production companies that make them rather than the names of their directors and one of the victims of this is probably Henry Selick, who’s recently discussed being kind of bitter that the most famous movie he directed (The Nightmare Before Christmas) has Tim Burton’s name all over it making people assume he was its director. His next most famous film, Coraline, also tends to be associated with the Laika brand too so it’s really not easy out there for him. It probably would have been easy (and from a marketing perspective, savvy) for his latest film Wendell and Wild to have been marketed as being more the work of his co-writer Jordan Peele but Selick himself seems to have gotten top billing. Unfortunately I’m not sure that this is the movie he’s going to want to be the most associated with because it’s kind of messy. On the positive side, the film has some cool character designs and an impressive voice cast but I find the world building here to be rather deficient; the whole thing is some kind of romp back and forth between the afterlife and the real world but it never really makes this conception of such things interesting. Worse than that, I can’t even really say I was entirely wowed by the stop motion animation here, which feels noticeably cruder than what Laika has gotten us used to nor would I say does it have the detail of something like Wes Anderson’s stop motion efforts. In many ways it might be a good indication of how much Selick maybe needs a visionary behind him like a Tim Burton or a Neil Gaiman in order to really have that complete vision. Jordan Peele by contrast, is a sharp filmmaker but one who mostly seems rooted in the real world rather than abstract fantasy land and I’m not sure he was the right person to partner up with Selick. I’m perhaps being a touch picky about this and am maybe underrating the film through expectations and that if it had caught me a bit more off guard I’d be more impressed.
**1/2 out of Five
Animation is often a difficult field to truly make a name in. Most animated films’ identities tend to be defined by the studios and production companies that make them rather than the names of their directors and one of the victims of this is probably Henry Selick, who’s recently discussed being kind of bitter that the most famous movie he directed (The Nightmare Before Christmas) has Tim Burton’s name all over it making people assume he was its director. His next most famous film, Coraline, also tends to be associated with the Laika brand too so it’s really not easy out there for him. It probably would have been easy (and from a marketing perspective, savvy) for his latest film Wendell and Wild to have been marketed as being more the work of his co-writer Jordan Peele but Selick himself seems to have gotten top billing. Unfortunately I’m not sure that this is the movie he’s going to want to be the most associated with because it’s kind of messy. On the positive side, the film has some cool character designs and an impressive voice cast but I find the world building here to be rather deficient; the whole thing is some kind of romp back and forth between the afterlife and the real world but it never really makes this conception of such things interesting. Worse than that, I can’t even really say I was entirely wowed by the stop motion animation here, which feels noticeably cruder than what Laika has gotten us used to nor would I say does it have the detail of something like Wes Anderson’s stop motion efforts. In many ways it might be a good indication of how much Selick maybe needs a visionary behind him like a Tim Burton or a Neil Gaiman in order to really have that complete vision. Jordan Peele by contrast, is a sharp filmmaker but one who mostly seems rooted in the real world rather than abstract fantasy land and I’m not sure he was the right person to partner up with Selick. I’m perhaps being a touch picky about this and am maybe underrating the film through expectations and that if it had caught me a bit more off guard I’d be more impressed.
**1/2 out of Five
