Henry Selick and Jordan Peele dream big—maybe too big—in the animated frightmare Wendell & Wild
A troubled teen struggles with demons both serious and comedic in this stop-motion film that also marks a reunion of sorts for Keegan and Peele
Wendell & Wild, the promising-on-paper collaboration between stop-motion legend Henry Selick and nouveau-horror maestro Jordan Peele, is about two demons who hatch a plan to open a theme park. It’s also about an orphaned teenage girl with survivor’s guilt. It’s also about an evil corporation scheming to build a for-profit prison. Wendell & Wild is about a lot of things. Too many things, actually. But it’s so packed with gloriously demented visuals and bold thematic swings that try, with varying degrees of success, to lift the film out of the realm of pure fantasy, that we’re not entirely bothered by the convoluted story. It’s a bit disappointing that these two visionary filmmakers couldn’t combine their formidable talents to create a more smoothly cohesive work. Nonetheless, it’s just too damn gorgeous to dismiss and the inclusionary characters modernize the animated antics in ways that will resonate with young adult audiences.
It’s a tip off to the film’s unruly nature that its title is Wendell & Wild yet neither of them is our hero. That would be 13-year-old Kat (voiced by Lyric Ross), a sullen and angry girl who blames herself for the death of her parents in a car accident five years earlier. She’s since become a behavioral challenge, which necessitates a return to her once thriving, now crumbling hometown of Rust Bank to enter a program for at-risk teens at the Rust Bank Catholic School for Girls. Kat is an outcast for reasons that go far beyond what most young leads experience in mainstream, youth-targeted animated fare. It allows Peele, who co-wrote the film with Selick, to put his sociopolitical stamp on another director’s material, and Selick to add representation to his traditional portrait of the plucky, troubled kid.
While Kat raises hell at Catholic school, down in the underworld Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele) perform prison labor on a hair farm, riding a tardigrade that drills holes and squirts hair gel into the enormous head of Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), their demon father who runs an amusement park of the damned on his fat stomach. If that sounds like a mouthful, get ready, because Wendell & Wild spirals and curlicues more than Belzer’s ghost-filled rollercoaster. Hell Maidens, Bearz-a-bubs, shapeshifting octopuses and the rules that dictate the interaction between the underworld and the Land of the Living make for some fuzzy world-building. Selick clearly wants us to just go with it since he’s creating as many opportunities to dazzle us as possible. And maybe we should, but it bogs down large chunks of the film, as do the often sluggish line readings that affect Peele, Key and the rest of a terrific voice cast that includes James Hong as the school headmaster, and Angela Bassett as a nun with a secret.