Laika's 132-Minute 'Wildwood' Wins Critic's Pick in NYT Review

Q: What dark magic and intense violence earned this handmade stop-motion rescue story a surprising PG-13 rating?

It earned the PG-13 mainly for its darker supernatural themes and unusually harsh fantasy violence for a Laika film. The key “dark magic” centers on Alexandra, the exiled Dowager Governess, a grieving mother who turns to black magic after her son’s death. In the story’s backstory, she has toymakers build a replacement body for him and uses forbidden magic to restore him, and later schemes to sacrifice baby Mac to the forest’s magical ivy to unleash destructive power across Wildwood. The violence is also far stronger than typical family animation. Review coverage describes bloody battlefield imagery, war between rival factions, constant peril, deaths, imprisonments, caged captives, armed coyote soldiers, and a large-scale climactic battle. Several accounts also note a grim opening involving a child’s fatal fall and suicide-related material, which helped push the rating higher. The Motion Picture Association rated “Wildwood” PG-13 for “strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language.” That makes it Laika’s first PG-13 release, reflecting that the film is not just a whimsical rescue adventure but a darker fantasy about grief, sacrifice, war and loss.

3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Oct 22

NYT gave Laika’s new stop-motion fantasy “Wildwood” a Critic’s Pick, calling it a magical, fast-paced adventure with impressive animation and broad storytelling.
132 minutes long and rated PG-13, the film adapts Colin Meloy’s 2011 novel and is directed by Travis Knight from a screenplay by Chris Butler.
Prue, voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, enters the Impassable Wilderness after her baby brother is abducted by crows, setting off a quest with a classmate voiced by Jacob Tremblay.
Set around Portland, Oregon, the story expands into a conflict involving anthropomorphic animals, bandits and a grief-driven wielder of dark magic, framing the film as a large-scale fantasy adventure.