Celebrate your inner demons with Netflix’s Wendell and Wild
Stop-frame animation auteur Henry Selick and his co-director, comedic actor Jordan Peele, hit all the right comedy-horror notes. By
Filmmaker Henry Selick’s gift is his ability to bring nightmares to life and life to nightmares. His stylised stopframe animation films are confidently creepy, but their whimsical charm and cheeky horror comedy let vibrancy coexist with the macabre in a unique way that audiences apparently love.
Selick’s latest film, Wendell and Wild, arguably does this more evenly than any of his others. His first, The Nightmare Before Christmas (conceived by Tim Burton and made 30 years ago), was as over the top as it could be, pairing a ghastly world with musical cheer. Between that and Wendell and Wild, Selick has only made three other films, the most celebrated being Coraline, which is certainly waggish but becomes progressively darker and more poignant.
Wendell and Wild is somewhere in between, striking a balance that makes it a great film for children and adults alike.
This is largely thanks to Selick’s co-director, Jordan Peele, who as well as making horror films such as Get Out and Nope is a brilliant comedian. Peele and his partner in comedy crime, Keegan-Michael Key, voice Wendell and Wild, a pair of demon brothers beautifully designed as gnarly purple caricatures of themselves.
They are a classic squabbling, villainous pair – tall and skinny, short and stout; cunning and irritable, goofy and carefree – and collectively dysfunctional enough to be either unintentionally harmless or unknowingly malevolent.
Wendell and Wild’s mischief is the slimy centre of the film’s edgy madness, so it seems fitting that it be named for them, but they’re not the protagonists. That would be Kat (Lyric Ross), a precocious, strong-willed teenager who has become angry, lonely and suspicious after five years of being moved around in the child welfare system.
The film opens with the memory of her parents’ death, inadvertently caused by her distracting them in a car as an eight-year-old. She’s deeply traumatised by the accident (“Figured I’d just hate myself for the rest of my life”) and her guilt and loneliness have got her into a lot of trouble, which for an orphan means time in juvenile detention centres.
Kat believes that people she gets close to are doomed, so she pushes them away to prevent them from getting hurt. But it’s also clear that she is reluctant to form attachments because she is scared of losing people again, thus perpetuating a cycle of isolation.
She embraces her own alienation in her punk-rock aesthetic, which is both a form of self-expression and a way to keep others at arm’s length. Kat’s character delves remarkably candidly into the psychological hurt experienced by troubled children and teens.
When we catch up with Kat, she is returning to Rust Bank, the town where her parents died. A welfare programme called Break The Cycle has enrolled her in a preppy Catholic school garrisoned by a gaggle of ghoulish nuns.
In the years she’s been gone, the once bustling town has succumbed to rot and has all but died, with dishevelled houses standing empty. A pair of opportunistic developers are buying up as much real estate as they can get their hands on to build a large private prison.
Wendell and Wild.
Just as Kat returns to her hometown and is forced to face her metaphorical demons, she meets her actual demons. “They say everyone’s got demons, right? My demons have names.”
Their names, of course, are Wendell and Wild. Kat, it turns out, is a hell-maiden, gifted with supernatural powers and cursed by demons that deceive her into summoning them to the material world.
Kat is a likeable, hardcore character but not a pleasant person, making her uncommon as a lead in a children’s film. Making deals with demons is not a trope one generally associates with good guys, and Selick uses this to break taboos.
The idea of a stubborn young woman working with her demons could well have been influenced by Bean and Lucy in Disenchantment, Matt Groening’s animated comedy. The relationship between manipulated lead and disruptive antihero affords licence to push the boundaries of what can be responsibly depicted in a children’s movie.
Most bold is Selick’s subversive imagery and themes. The mere inclusion of a blood oath, a demonic nun or a zombie priest (voiced to perfection by James Hong) is controversial, and there is fairly sophisticated social commentary on the decay of community, the corrupt nature of privatised development and the prison industrial complex, in particular.
The second half of the film is a little more childish than it needs to be, but that is not nearly enough to damn the whole thing. A few of the multitudinous narratives are reached successfully – Kat’s character progression, in particular towards self-forgiveness and gratitude for those who are kind to her, works well.
The sets and objects are made with a level of care that grabs one’s attention in a way that cute, polished 3D CGI animation seldom can, and the character designs are wonderfully stylised into vivacious cartoonish figures that are charming even while being slightly grotesque.
There’s something unsettling about the jerky movement of stop-frame animation, even when it isn’t trying to be. When it’s used to intentionally appear spooky, the medium is arguably at its best, and the combination of Selick’s crafting, Peele’s comedic flare and a damn good soundtrack makes Wendell and Wild a prime example
of this.
Wendell and Wild