Wendell & Wild

Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a follow-up. In the world of stop-motion animation, where a single second of footage can take a week to produce, time moves differently. But for fans of Henry Selick, the gap between the masterpiece Coraline (2009) and the arrival of Wendell & Wild in late 2022 felt like an eternity. I watched this on a Tuesday afternoon while my neighbor was seemingly trying to drill a hole through our shared wall, but even that rhythmic thumping couldn't drown out the sheer, chaotic personality of this film.

It’s a strange beast, arriving in a contemporary landscape where big-budget animation is often smoothed over by digital perfection. Here, Selick does the opposite. He embraces the "seams"—you can literally see the lines on the characters' faces where their 3D-printed expressions were swapped out. It’s a tactile, punk-rock middle finger to the uncanny valley, and I love it for that. Yet, despite the pedigree of Selick and producer/writer Jordan Peele, the movie seemed to vanish into the Netflix "Content Void" within weeks. It’s a tragedy of the streaming era: if a movie doesn't become a viral meme or a three-quadrant juggernaut in its first forty-eight hours, the algorithm hides it behind a row of mediocre baking competitions.

A Thirteen-Year Itch Scratched in Stop-Motion

The story centers on Kat Elliot, voiced with a perfect "leave me alone" rasp by Lyric Ross (This Is Us). Kat is a "Hellmaiden," a punk-loving orphan with a tragic past and a pair of literal demons on her back. Those demons, the titular Wendell and Wild, are played by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, reuniting the most iconic comedic duo of the 2010s. If you’ve missed their sketch-comedy chemistry, this film is a warm, weird hug. They play two brothers dreaming of building a "Dream Faire" in the Land of the Living, escaping their job of applying hair-regrowth cream to a massive, subterranean demon lord named Buffalo Belzer.

The adventure isn’t just a trek through the Underworld; it’s a journey back to Kat's dying hometown, Rust Bank. The film wears its modern heart on its sleeve, tackling the school-to-prison pipeline and corporate greed with a bluntness that caught me off guard. Netflix really buried this under a mountain of mediocre Christmas rom-coms, which is a shame because it’s one of the few "family" films that actually feels like it has something to say about the world we live in right now. It doesn't just offer escapism; it offers a way to look at the ruins of a community and think about how to rebuild it.

Punk Rock, Private Prisons, and Plasticine

Visually, the movie is a riot. It discards the eerie, porcelain smoothness of Coraline for a jagged, AFROPUNK-inspired aesthetic. Kat’s design—green hair, oversized boots, and a boombox that serves as a weapon of spiritual warfare—is an instant classic. The world-building is equally dense. We get a trans character, Raúl (Sam Zelaya), whose identity is handled with a refreshing, matter-of-fact grace that never feels like a checkbox. We get Angela Bassett as a badass nun with a secret. We even get James Hong as a greedy priest, because no animated adventure is complete without James Hong.

However, the film is busy. Very busy. The plot has more subplots than a Dickens novel on speed. Between the corporate villains trying to build a private prison, the demon brothers’ antics, the undead parents, and the magical lore of the Hellmaidens, the narrative occasionally trips over its own shoelaces. It lacks the streamlined, fairy-tale elegance of The Nightmare Before Christmas. But I’d honestly rather have a movie that tries to do way too much than one that does the bare minimum. Every frame is packed with handmade detail, from the way the smoke is represented by tufts of cotton to the eccentric, spindly character designs that look like they crawled out of a teenager’s sketchbook.

The Handmade vs. The Algorithm

Why did Wendell & Wild get lost? Part of it was the timing. It was released in the same window as Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which hoovered up the "prestige stop-motion" awards and attention. While Del Toro went for the gut-wrenching and the lyrical, Selick and Peele went for the loud and the messy. In the streaming age, "loud and messy" is a harder sell for the critics, but it’s often more rewarding for those of us looking for something that feels alive.

The film serves as a reminder that Jordan Peele is just as potent a creative force behind the scenes as he is in the director's chair for films like Nope or Get Out. His fingerprints are all over the social commentary and the dark humor. It’s a contemporary film that uses a "dead" art form (stop-motion) to talk about very current anxieties—climate, justice, and the ghosts of our past. If you missed it when it dropped on Netflix with a whisper, do yourself a favor and find it. It’s a vibrant, clattering, beautiful mess that deserves to be someone’s favorite "half-forgotten" movie.

Ultimately, Wendell & Wild is a victory for style and spirit over narrative polish. It’s the kind of film that feels like it was built by hand in a garage, which is exactly what it was. It’s a reminder that animation doesn’t have to be "cute" to be captivating, and it doesn't have to be simple to be for kids. It’s a weird, wild ride that’s well worth the 105 minutes, even if you have a neighbor drilling through your walls the whole time.