Together, they've drawn from more wells than they know what to do with, and given us a truly one-of-a-kind concoction that delights through the sheer power of its "Did-you-just-seet-that?" image-making. If Wendell & Wild makes me more sure than ever that Peele could use an editor, it also makes me happy that instead, in Selick, found an enabler. As a fan of his Get Out and, to a lesser extent, Us, I wondered if perhaps he'd been prematurely anointed to the frontlines of 21st century horror and his well had run dry. I'm one of few critics who found Nope, Peele's alien-focused summer blockbuster, a little dull. If it's not polished enough to land a merch line at Hot Topic, though, it's gutsy enough to ask contemporary stories aimed at young audiences to up their game-what other recent tale of BIPOC children, for example, takes on the school to prison pipeline so unflinchingly? Jagged pacing and dark subject matter abound, both to the film's benefit and its occasional detriment. There's plenty of effective humor here, and a squishy center, but the film's idiosyncrasies stretch beyond a bizarre visual style and loopy plotting. It's hard, though, to imagine Wendell & Wild landing a spot in the culture as hallowed as Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas. It's easy to imagine this film shaping a very specific kind of 10-year-old for the rest of their lives. The setting, a fog-choked industrial town laid with a thin layer of snow, is gothic and heart-swelling, the stuff of obsessive childhood immersion. The characters are angular and unsettled, hips jutting on unusual axes and seams visible at the forehead. One of the first projects to come out of Netflix's new animation wing (the platform will also distribute Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, made largely in ShadowMachine's Portland studio, later this year), Wendell & Wild looks unlike anything Laika or Selick have ever produced. That said, if you're on the right wavelength-or, frankly, the right drugs-its unbridled imagination can be exhilarating. Families and animation-lovers who were, say, underwhelmed by the invention on display in Minions : The Rise of Gru, will have their proverbial socks knocked off here, teeming as Selick's film is with original ideas given painstaking, handmade life.Īnd what life it is. Find out more about the history of stop motion and the techniques used to capture the magic. Clever camera tricks and an eye for the minute details combine to create captivating moving images. It juggles so many threads and builds such an elaborate world that the dialogue can get overly expository and you sometimes have to squint to find its focus. Stop motion animation is a simple yet effective way to bring the everyday to life. You might reasonably call Wendell & Wild overstuffed. Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that. If that sounds like a busy A plot, please enjoy plots B through Z: there is a brewery fire and subsequent coverup an intergenerational conflict between a Trump-like prison mogul and his goat-wielding daughter an undead city council election a secret partnership between a footless demon hunter and a nun voiced by Angela Bassett and an ongoing gag about the devil (voiced by Ving Rhames) refusing to go bald. She's thrust back to her deteriorating hometown as part of a grant program and given a full ride to the local Catholic school, where she learns she has special powers and is convinced to summon the titular troublemakers (voiced by Peele and his former comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key) to the land of the living. Junk Head is released on 24 April in UK cinemas.Birthed from a story by Selick and Jordan Peele, the film is organized around Kat Elliot (voiced by This Is Us's Lyric Ross), a teenager who bears witness to her parents' drowning as a young girl and then lands in juvenile detention center as a teen. Sure to send shockwaves up your spine, this triumph of animation demands to be seen on a big screen. Still, the astonishing level of craftsmanship and creativity trumps any minor shortcomings. Junk Head also leaves many story threads unfinished, intended as it is as the first instalment in a series. The blood-splattered sequences where the grotesque predators gnaw on their hapless victims are punctuated with moments of levity, friendship and jokes some might find this tonally jarring and crude. Stacked with towering heaps of metal scraps, endless staircases and grimy corridors that lead to a bottomless pit, the painstakingly imagined art direction conjures the expressionist spirit of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, while the infernal monsters that dog the hero’s every step are especially striking in their carcass-like designs, a Francis Bacon triptych coming to terrifying life. Existential quandaries aside, the otherworldly magic of Junk Head is visual rather than plot-based.
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