Wendell & Wild 2022

[7.1/10] Wendell & Wild’s heart is in the right place. It has multiple good messages, about your demons making you stronger once you own and accept your past, about fostering and restoring a community, and even about the excesses of private prisons. It has a diverse cast full of characters given life and purpose in the narrative. It has an array of well-pedigreed talent both “in front of” and behind the camera. And it doesn’t talk down to the younger audience it’s aimed at, hitting some big and challenging ideas with the confidence that kids are ready for them.

And yet, somehow, the whole is not quite greater than the sum of its parts. The film is not bad by any stretch of the imagination. There’s enough vivid imagery, wholesome moments, and endearingly off-beat choices to sustain the movie through its runtime. But with a cast like this, a horror-master with the credibility of Jordan Peele as co-writer and co-star, and the legendary director Henry Selick helming the project, there’s reason to expect greatness. Instead, Wendell & Wild levels out somewhere around “pretty good”. That’s a bit of a disappointment, even if the results are still solid and enjoyable.

The film tells the story of Kat, a young woman who loses her parents in a tragic accident, followed by her bouncing around group homes and the juvenile justice system, before she ultimately finds her way back to catholic girl’s school back in the town where her trauma began. There, she meets Raul, her intrigued-but-struggling classmate; Sister Helley, a teacher with a secret connection to her; and the eponymous demonic duo whose double act, theme park dreams, and chance to seek their fortunes in the human realm depends on Kat as their “hell maiden”.

Even that undersells the amount of narrative plumbing that’s built into the premise of Wendell & Wild. If there’s a major flaw in the film’s story, it’s that it tries to do too much.

In the span of an hour and forty-five minutes, the movie attempts to cover: Kat reckoning with her grief and the person it’s turned her into, Raul being dead-named and misunderstood but proving his worth, Sister Helley mentoring another young hellmaiden through her trauma and the immediate crisis; Wendell and Wild breaking free of their devilish dad in a scheme to earn enough money raising the dead to fund their theme park, the greedy Klaxon family trying to takeover the town council to approve their plan to turn Rust Bank into one big private prison, Raul’s mom doing an investigation to prove they’re behind the fire that destroyed Kat’s parents’ brewery, Kat’s parents coming back from the dead and reuniting with their child, the father and principal of the school being murdered and then scheming to stay alive once the demons revive him, the Klaxons' daughter seeing through her parents lies and awakening to their sins, Manberg (Sister Helley’s watcher equivalent) freeing the demons he’s captured over the years, Wendell and Wild’s giant dad (named Buffalo Belzer) invading the realm of the living and realizing how he pushed his children away, and honestly, even that is leaving a fair bit out!

There’s just too many story threads, in a way that makes you wish Peele and Sellick had collaborated on a television show, with enough time to dig into each of them and let these events breathe, rather than rushing through a lot of well-conceived but undercooked ideas. None of these elements are bad. With time to flesh them out, the ones that seem glancing could be impactful, and the ones that are already impactful could feel part of a broader whole rather than a rolling clump. The lack of direction leaves the film feeling aimless and logy in several places. But at best, “Wendell & Wild” feels like three good movies’ crammed into a single runtime, leaving everything and everyone feeling the squeeze.

The same goes for its themes. Trying to bundle together “My difficult past made me stronger”, the prisons industrial complex, understanding that it’s okay to let people in, urban renewal, reuniting families, and scads of other mini-themes means the film lacks focus. Even if you could streamline the plot a bit here, which wouldn’t be that challenging, the film tries to say too much at once and ends up jumbling and short-changing its otherwise touching and incisive points. And even then, there’s a lot of handholding for the audience that detracts from, rather than enhances, the messages.

The benefit of any Selick movie is supposed to be that even if you’re not a fan of the story, the artistry is supposed to keep you engaged on vibes alone. And there’s some cool visual elements of this one, including ones I wish we got to spend more time with. The paper-thin souls on a beelzebub-inspired belly-bound theme part is a hell of a striking image. The grim look of a revivified Father Bests catches the eye. And the zombified movements of “The Old Guard” walk that wonderfully line between cool and creepy.

But the character designs here aren’t as neat or memorable as in past Selick projects. Exaggeration has long been the name of the game, but something feels off in the design principles that makes them less distinctive. Maybe it’s just the animation. Selick’s team is full of pros, and there’s some good cartoon movements to enjoy. (I particularly enjoy the way Wendell and Wild’s steed, sparkplug, moves about.) But the stop motion team has gotten so good that sometimes the characters’ movements start to sink into the uncanny valley. And outside of some neat mixed media interludes, the settings and designs don’t wow the way they did in Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.

Sometimes the film is just gross, and not in a terribly entertaining way. I don’t mind the grody or grotesque, but I don’t know, something about the title characters playing around with boogers and bug guts quickly stopped being fun. Some of that’s unavoidable, with the pair living in their father’s nostrils. But even then, the prospect of a Key and Peele reunion in animation wasn’t as amusing as that billing promises.

Despite all my gripes, Wendell & Wild is still a solid outing. Kat has a cool arc and makes for the kind of protagonist you don’t always get to see in a kids movie. The premise is good enough that I’m asking for more of it, not less. The needle drops are particularly well-placed, and the points about self-forgiveness and communities banding together are strong. You could do much worse than this movie.

But you could also do better. Peele and Selick are damned by their own impossibly high standards, let alone the expected synergy of the pair working together. The weird and whimsical is still there. The resonant story is still there. The inventive horror is still there. The duo just can’t find a way to tie it all together into a greater whole, resulting in something admittedly wild, but also something of a letdown.