Taking place in Portland, Prue is a girl who has been left in charge of her baby brother Mac while their parents go to a fair with the explicit instruction that Prue never take Mac outside of their house. Like most teens, Pruse brushes this off and takes Mac out for a bike ride with him in a wagon, and she runs into her dorky schoolmate Curtis. Suddenly, a massive crew of crows snatch Mac away from them and fly him into the dark forest called the Impassible Wilderness, with Prue and Curtis chasing after them. Curtis gets captured by an army of talking coyotes while Prue seeks help from the governor of this magical realm which is sealed off from the rest of the world. The two of them have their own separate journeys with the various factions that occupy the enchanted woods. The coyotes are led by a traumatized dowager governess named Alexandra who is the one that orchestrated Mac's kidnapping and uses witchcraft with plans to sacrifice Mac to bring her back her departed son. The acting governor only cares about keeping order, so he has Prue locked away, but she's freed by the bird principality while their brave general dies taking Prue to mystic hippies who communicate with a giant tree that is the pillar of the whole forest. Curtis escapes Alexandra's dungeon along with some imprisoned bandits who are also against the governess' dungeon, all while Prue briefly returns to her parents to learn the truth about her and Mac's origins. Armed with this new knowledge, Prue goes back to the Impassible Wilderness to save Mac in a climactic battle which will decide everyone's fate.
Wildwood is total perfection in all visual respects with the entirety of Laika's effort on full display which shows all the time they took to create it with every intricate detail that make this possibly the greatest stop-motion animated film of all time. Despite its practically flawless execution in lifelike imagery, the drawback to this is the plot which throws every possible fantasy cliche into the mix. There's several allusions to various other fantasy sources like Wizard Of Oz, Narnia, Labyrinth, Secret Of Mana, and Lord Of The Rings which gives people the impression that the screenwriters just picked a bunch of story tropes out of a fishbowl and went with whatever they thought would fit. The original novel might have had a more solid structure with strong archetypes, but none of those transfer to the movie with mirky plot devices, stock characters, and large expositions given to nearly everyone's backstory. For Laika to have achieved such a vivid masterpiece for the eyes, it seriously missed the mark when it came to writing a cohesive storyline. Stay for the visuals but put your brain on hold when it comes to all the overwhelming plot inconsistencies.
