Score: 4 / 5
Henry Selick returns to his directorial chair for the first time in thirteen years, and it's another visually stunning, creatively intoxicating, and generally overwhelming adventure. His amazing stop-motion animation style is a genre unto itself, to say nothing of his dark and uncanny aesthetic. This time, it's an exclusive streaming release on Netflix during spooky season, the most appropriate choice for this dark and strange story. It feels much like A Nightmare Before Christmas and a bit like James and the Giant Peach, but this film embraces a slightly more surreal style than even Coraline (Selick's last directorial feature). Perhaps its ingenuity and freshness are due to co-writer and producer (and voice actor) Jordan Peele, who is quickly becoming a top-tier horror auteur like Tim Burton always seemed hopeful of being.
Kat (Lyric Ross) is a young Black girl who was orphaned at a young age after her father accidentally drove off a bridge. She blames herself for the accident that killed her parents, and now she's a punk-rock juvenile delinquent in an all-girls Catholic school run by a kindly but mysterious nun named Helley (Angela Bassett). Her only friend is Raul (Sam Zelaya), a trans boy, whose mother helps reveal the film's main conflict to Kat: a private prison company called Klaxon Korp is taking over their town, Rust Bank, and pressuring the school's head, Father Best (James Hong) to give up the property. The Klaxons have a daughter, Siobhan, who leads a posse of preppy kids at the school to antagonize the outcasts, much like Draco Malfoy did. It's a surprising choice for a film like this to be so interested in the prison industrial complex and to paint it in such lurid ways in a kids' movie. But then, some of the best animated films work on a surface level for kids and a more cerebral level for adults; why shouldn't we expose our kids to some of the most serious, complex issues of our time through palatable, fun media?
Wendell and Wild, meanwhile, are demons who work mindless drudgery in the underworld for their father, Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). "Belzer" must be a corruption of Beelzebub and he manages and operates a theme park of hell to torment lost souls, but this demonic daddy with his chest harness is easily the creepiest thing in this film, as Wendell and Wild literally live and work on his body. They sleep in his nostrils and by day work to replenish hair on his scalp with a magic serum. Wild (Peele) likes to eat the hair cream, which apparently gets him high; Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and he suddenly discover that the cream actually brings things back to life. When Kat spontaneously gets marked as a Hell Maiden, the demons approach her in dreams with an opportunity: if she summons them to the world of the living, they will use their cream to resurrect her parents.
It's refreshing that Kat isn't a tragic or wimpy character; in fact, she retains her independence and stubbornness and strength throughout the film. It's also refreshing that Key and Peele are so effortlessly funny in their seemingly endless banter as two dispossessed (ha ha!) brothers who are just dumb or bored enough to do something daring and dangerous. The film is smart enough, conversely, to not make Wendell and Wild the villains; Selick and Peele emphasize that those who look like traditional villains aren't too bad, whereas those with money and power are far worse when they prey on and profit off the suffering of others. It's not as clear in terms of narrative, and will surely take some explaining for younger audiences; there are other subplots, too, and off-the-cuff jokes that pile up at times a bit too much. I felt occasionally overstimulated during my own viewing and had to pause just to look at something else more than once.
But that's to say nothing of the beautiful artistry of this film, which I liked just about as much as in Nightmare and Coraline, and in some ways more than those. I repeatedly found myself wishing the film would slow down or cut a character or two just so I could take some time to appreciate the animation, the designs, the voice acting, and the implications of the story. Its kinetic energy turns frenetic early on, so much so that I think I'll need at least one additional viewing to really get a full grasp on the film. But that's kind of typical of Selick's work, as long as you have a stomach for his aesthetic.
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