A Spoiler-Free Review of Wendell and Wild (2022)
Wendell and Wild is a film directed by the Oscar-nominated stop-motion filmmaker, Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele.
As a twenty-something-year-old living in Toronto, I had the exciting opportunity to watch Wendell and Wild at its world premiere for free (the Toronto International Film Festival, aka TIFF, offers many free perks to anyone under 25)! Since it’s not on Netflix for another month, I’m going to do my best to write a spoiler-free review.
The film follows a teenage girl named Kat who is haunted by emotional trauma that she experienced as a child. When two demon brothers, Wendell and Wild, decide to meddle in Kat’s life, an entertaining tale of political activism and overcoming trauma ensues.
Both writers of the story, Selick and Peele, have had fairly prolific careers in Hollywood to date that can be found through a quick Google search. The two began collaborating before the release of Get Out (2017) and Peele’s fame as a horror film director.
Wendell and Wild also brings back the on-screen duo of Keegan Michael Key and Peele! These are the guys from the Substitute and Obama’s Anger Translator sketches that you probably have seen on YouTube if not in Key and Peele (2012–2015) itself. The two play the film’s titular characters, and their chemistry is unsurprisingly hilarious. Selick approached them about the roles after watching their sketch of the Terry characters.
The animation in this film is eerie and fun, which is just what we can expect from a feature directed by Selick. Just like any feature-length animation film, Wendell and Wild was a years-long labor of love. Seven years to be exact. By now, you can see trailers for it on YouTube, where you can catch a sneak peek of its artistry.
Some paraphrased thoughts from Selick in the post-screening Q&A at TIFF on his animation choices:
- It took some convincing for Key and Peele to be caricatured as Wendell and Wild. The final characters’ appearances make their interactions on-screen synonymous to watching a Key and Peele sketch in a different dimension.
- Most of the characters are marked by harsh lines that cut across their faces. These lines are actually seams that reveal the characters as puppets. Although the lines could have been erased by “replacement animation,” they were left in the film to remind the audience of the artifice of stop-motion.
Another great element of Wendell and Wild is the representation in voice casting- the racial diversity of characters we see on-screen is represented by correspondingly diverse voices. Characters from black, Latino, and Asian communities are represented both visually and audibly. And I think the cast did a phenomenal job. Lyric Ross’s soothing voice as Kat makes for a cool and confident protagonist, while Sam Zelaya’s soft-spoken delivery as Raul is a satisfying contrast to Key and Peele’s brash back-and-forth.
The music in the film composed by Bruno Coulais is also worth noting in my opinion. I enjoyed the clash of quiet, eerie humming and rock and roll elements throughout the story- some of which has already been previewed. Knowing that Coulais worked with Selick on Coraline (2009), you can expect similarly creepy melodies that nestle into a story for a young audience.
Selick and Peele mesh their strengths from previous work to create a story that I found spooky, funny, and hopeful. I think it has a satisfying balance of humour, drama, and preachiness for a young and impressionable audience.
I plan on posting an analysis of the film with spoilers once the film is released. In the meantime, mark your calendars for Wendell and Wild’s premiere on Netflix on October 28th!
