[COLUMN] Wildwood Celebrates Hand-Made Art | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece actually doesn’t contain any real spoilers for the narrative of Wildwood, beyond the opening two minutes and the villain’s big motivation, neither of which is treated as a major reveal. But if you want to go in blind, be aware of that. If you’re looking for a recommendation: it’s great. It’s the second-best film I’ve seen so far this year. Just stunning filmmaking.

One of the first shots in Travis Knight’s Wildwood is of a leaf blowing gently in the night breeze.

Now, in a live action film, the shot could be achieved relatively easily. The production team would find a leaf. They would either use an actual plant or build a plastic replica. They could film on a closed set, or find a real location that actually exists and augment that. The shot of the leaf blowing might have been designed and planned in advance, requiring the use of a wind machine. However, it could also simply have been a result of chance, the fact a light wind was blowing while the film was shot.

However, Wildwood is not a live action film. It is a stop-motion animation. It unfolds in a world created entirely by human hands. There are no actors on screen. There are no real locations. Every model is painstakingly constructed. Every prop is carefully designed. Every environment is micromanaged down to the smallest possible detail. Every individual frame is carefully engineered, and then each frame is compiled into a sequence to construct a shot.

So that little leaf blowing gently in the night breeze was a result of an incredibly vast and complex series of thoughtful human decisions. How far should that leaf move in the first frame? In the second frame, should it move in the same direction or start moving back? Does it move exactly the same distance it did in the first shot, or slightly more, or slightly less? How exactly should this beautiful, detailed little prop bend in the wind that does not actually exist, but is conjured between frames?

These are all questions that the production team has to think about and answer. Those answers are based on a lot of external factors. Some of those factors are scientific. The animators undoubtedly studied video footage of real leaves swaying in real breezes. However, there is still a discussion to be had about how best to replicate that effect. There is also a broader discussion to be had about storytelling. Real leaves might move a particular way, but this leaf is not a real leaf.

The beauty of watching Wildwood is that virtually every shot or scene in the movie is full of elements like this. Characters’ hair drifts in the breeze, moving in response to the way they move their bodies or tilt their hair. The fur and the feathers of the various woodland animals move in distinct ways between shots. And none of this happens as a result of just filming light or wind, or even modelling it digitally. Every choice involves the use of human hands to align or configure those elements.

There is, for example, a really fun and daring dungeon escape sequence that relies heavily on the application of gravity and physics to the characters. However, these are stop motion figurines, paused and photographed in still images, so it falls to the human artists to create the illusion of gravity and physics by combining those still images into a reel. It’s a simulation of gravity and physics, but one which requires an incredible level of thought or consideration.

And Wildwood wants the audience to engage with this. The film tells a magical epic fantasy story, but it does not pretend to be “gossip about imaginary people”, a documentary beamed in from some parallel universe. It asks the audience to consider it as a constructed object, to think about it as a piece of work rather than as a simple “plot delivery mechanism.” It asks the audience to engage with Roger Ebert’s argument that, “It’s not what the movie is about, but how it is about it.”

One of the greatest special effects in cinema remains Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle. It’s not one of the greatest special effects shots because any audience member thinks it’s real. The audience knows that Kermit is a puppet. It is a great special effects shot because, even knowing that Kermit is a puppet, the audience has to think about the difficulty and the ingenuity of pulling that off. Knowing that Kermit isn’t real doesn’t make that shot less impressive. It makes it more impressive.

And the same is try of Wildwood, where a lot of the film’s stunts and set pieces are impressive because the audience knows that these are puppets. How did the team figure out how to get light to glisten like that on water in stop motion? How hard must it have been to coordinate the action of a Lord of the Rings scale final battle using puppets? How does one convincingly replicate the way that a human being expresses emotion through muscles and skin on a puppet of gears and wires?

Wildwood is designed from the very beginning to draw the audience’s attention to its artifice. The opening sequence features a young prince who realizes that he is not a person, but an automaton. He pulls a cog from his body, demonstrating his uncanniness. This is then revealed as a story-within-a-story, read by a father (Jake Johnson) to his daughter Pru (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and his son Mac (Arthur Knight). Wildwood wants the audience to understand that this is all a story.

It is an opening that recalls the introductory scenes of Travis Knight’s directorial debut, Kubo and the Two Strings, in which the young Kubo (Art Parkinson), himself a storyteller with the power to bring inanimate objects to life, directly addresses the audience, “Please be warned: If you fidget, if you look away, if you forget any part of what I tell you - even for an instant - then our hero will surely perish.” In other words, the audience must be engaged with this world, in order to sustain it.

The stop motion films produced by Laika go out of their way to stress the work that has been put into them by human hands. Not only do they showcase the care and craft in supplementary material, but the closing credits will often showcase how exactly these films are animated. While films like Kubo and the Two Strings and Wildwood want the audience to be engaged with the story being told, they also want them to understand the art with which it is being told.

This impulse exists in contrast to larger trends within the entertainment industry over the past couple of decades. It has often felt like mainstream American cinema has aggressively pursued the idea of “realism” and “verisimilitude” as aspirational ideals, the belief that the images presented to an audience on screen should look “as realistic” as possible, and that if the audience is aware of or engaged with the artistry of what is being constructed, then the film or television show has failed.

This trend is evident in a number of different ways. It’s evident in the shift from hand-drawn animation toward computer-generated imagery. For decades, realistic skin and hair textures and physics were treated as the holy grail of computer-generated animation. Complicated computer models were built to simulate real-world phenomena like water or gravity, rather than leaving it to the human animators to convey the physics themselves.

However, this push also happened in live action cinema. Over the past few decades, stylized practical effects such as prosthetics, models and matte-painted backgrounds have given way to the application of computer-generated imagery that is designed to look more “realistic” and more “verisimilitudinous” than those older techniques. This is why that sort of imagery can often cross into the uncanny valley, looking close enough to reality that the incongruous elements become unsettling.

It arguably even happened with an entire medium. At the turn of the millennium, digital recording and projection emerged in contrast to film. In the early years, as demonstrated by projects like Sin City, Miami Vice, Inland Empire, Speed Racer and so on, digital cinematography had a very distinct feel and texture to it. It was not trying to emulate film, but instead creating its own distinct aesthetic language. And audience members could tell what was shot on film as compared to digital.

However, in the decades that followed, digital was pushed to emulate film, because it was decided that is what movies “should” look like. The goal was to erase the audience’s awareness of digital as a distinct medium. It is entirely possible to watch a movie shot on digital and assume that it must have been shot on film, such as Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. It raises questions about why it is more important to simulate a particular texture than it is to come by it organically.

It perhaps, more broadly, exists in a larger context of the attempt to erase the artist and the artistry from the art. As Martin Scorsese has pointed out, even the modern trend of referring to media as “content” has the consequence of erasing form from discussion. “’Content’ became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode,” Scorsese mused in an article for Harper’s Bazaar.

This is evident in the way that people talk about art, particularly the way that certain sections of the internet bristle against the idea of an artist constructing a work having a distinct perspective. This year alone, it was part of various vocal backlashes to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil and Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy and Tom King’s Lanterns. The unspoken subtext of these criticisms is that the artist should shut up and remove themselves from the art.

And, unfortunately, as with pretty much every discussion about the role of the artist in media today, this inevitably circles back around to the looming threat of generative artificial intelligence models, which are basically designed to appeal to the culture that has been cultivated by these trends. Large language models default to existing art styles and photorealism, their quality often measured by their ability to fool the human eye into thinking the imagery is “real.”

Indeed, the specter of generative artificial intelligence haunts Wildwood. Travis Knight has made his feelings on the technology clear: “AI can go fuck itself.” Early in the film, riding her bike through Portland, Pru passes a sign reading, “Enjoy handmade art, before it’s gone forever.” The central horror of the film is the efforts by grief-stricken Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) to create an uncanny simulation of her lost son, and her willingness to destroy nature to do so.

Part of the issue with generative artificial intelligence, aside from the environmental concerns or the fact that it is a gigantic plagiarism machine, is that it removes the element of choice from the creation of art. The user enters a prompt, no matter how detailed, and the machine just fills in all the details around that prompt with a statistically collated dataset based on its training data: costume design, set design, lighting, props, background details, micro-expressions, and so on.

There is no intentionality behind this. There is just a randomly generated selection based on preexisting data. It is a machine designed to spare the user the burden of the choices or decisions that are necessary to make art. It is, in the parlance of the times, “frictionless.” It is a simulation of artistry, without any of the work of making art. And this ignores the reality that with things like art, the process is not just important, but also part of the end product. It cannot be stripped out.

In Wildwood, the process of its construction is inseparable from the film itself. It’s impossible to watch Wildwood without feeling the fingerprints on every individual frame of the finished film. At every possible moment in the sixteen years that it took to bring the film to life, somebody was making a human decision about what was going to appear on screen and why it would appear on screen, and what it served in terms of communicating the film’s story, characters, themes and world.

It’s a work of the kind of magic that can only flow through human hands.