Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wendell and Wild’ on Netflix, a Totally Batty Stop-Motion Phantasmagoria From Henry Selick and Jordan Peele

Wendell and Wild (now on Netflix) pairs wildly visionary stop-motion-animation director Henry Selick with New Master of Horror Jordan Peele: You know the former from the inimitable The Nightmare Before Christmas and the maybe even more inimitable Coraline. And you know the latter from neo-horror classic Get Out and boggling sci-fi-Western thing Nope. Does their pairing — Selick as director, Peele as producer, both as writers — on this kinda-for-kids-but-also-kinda-for-adults creepy animated adventure a case of two great tastes that taste great together? Maybe. But they definitely taste very weird together.

WENDELL AND WILD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Warning: This is a whole hell of a lot of strangeness. And sadness, tragedy, comedy and just a touch of Satan. There’s this girl named Kat (voice of Lyric Ross) whose mom and dad died in a car wreck when she was eight. She ended up in a group home and in a lot of trouble – as in sent-to-juvie trouble. Her parents owned a brewery that was the hub of the town, Rustbank; after their death, the brewery burned down, decimating the community, which is now mostly a ghost town.

So there’s your setting, although some of the movie also takes place in Hell. Like, literal Hell, where two goofball demons, Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele) spend their days toting a tube of hair cream across their father’s scalp, resurrecting his follicles, and spend their nights in their father’s nostrils, among all the hair and mucus. Yes, it’s true. I only report what I see here. Who is their father, you might ask? Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), a giant demon lord who might be the Devil himself, but that’s never made clear. Ol’ BB, with his beard and shades, looks a lot like Isaac Hayes on the cover of “Hot Buttered Soul,” but with a rotund Totoroian midsection; he lays on his back while small demons ride rollercoasters in a deranged amusement park sitting atop his giant belly. Whoever came up with this stuff, I’ll have what they’re having.

Back on the mortal plane, Kat is now 13 and being sent back to Rustbank where she’ll attend an all-girls Catholic school, which, like everything in town, is sparsely populated. A few not-quite-mean girls greet her and grate on her by calling her KK. She befriends her artistically inclined classmate Raul (Sam Zelaya), who used to be Ramona. She meets the headmaster, Father Bests (James Hong), and his two comic-relief nun toadies dubbed “the penguins,” and her teacher, Sister Helley (Angel Bassett). Here Kat learns – what with what? Yes, ONE THING AND ANOTHER – that she’s a “Hellmaiden” with the power to prognosticate and whatnot. Meanwhile, Wendell and Wild learn that their pops’ hair cream can bring dead bugs and people back to life, so they strike a bargain with Kat: They’ll resurrect her parents if she summons them to the surface so they can build their own dream amusement park.

But, as they say, wait, there’s more. So much more. Tons of Rustbank property is owned by the Klax Korp, operated by the Klaxons, Cruella de Vil lookalike Irmgard (Maxine Peake) and Trumpy-haired Lane (David Harewood), mega-richies who spend their time grubbing money and (shudder) golfing. Their goal is to build a gigantic private prison, which doesn’t sit well with the remaining citizenry. How will the Klaxons get the votes they need for their proposed ordinance? This is a good one: They’ll use Wendell and Wild’s wacky cream to resuscitate all the old, dead townsfolk so they can cast their YEAs and get the bulldozers rolling. I’m no expert, but I think that constitutes election fraud.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Selick’s aesthetic is singular, and the plot to this thing is very much its own thing, so comparisons don’t come easy. I guess it’s like Coraline crossed with the Futurama episode about Robot Hell.

Performance Worth Watching: Key and Peele reunion? KEY AND PEELE REUNION!

Memorable Dialogue: “They say everyone’s got demons, right? My demons have names.” – Kat

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Wendell and Wild is absolutely the first-ever animated film that’s a pro-community, anti-private-prison ostensibly-kiddie movie about death and expunging one’s personal demons. That’s a lot of stuffing for just one bird. It’s busting at the seams with ideas. Overflowing. Foaming up like way way too much soap in the washer. To say it’s restlessly original is to shrug dismissively at the depth of the Mariana Trench. Key word being restlessly, which is both blessing and curse – Peele and Selick’s ambition feels more engineered than free-flowing, and the film, with its multiple plots and extensive rogue’s gallery of characters, moves with a couple too many clunks and not quite enough madcap glee.

But that’s killjoy talk. Nitpickery, maybe. Because Wendell and Wild is smart, witty and not at all concerned with pleasing anyone. Selick and Peele co-opt a wild muse, following it through satire, myth and social commentary. Religious institutions get jabbed and corporate institutions get jabbed harder in a story pitting greed against the greater good. Our protagonist, the angry, prickly, classically punk-rock Kat, is set up to be consumed by the prison industrial complex; good thing she doesn’t play nice with pretty much anyone. This thematic fodder mixes a little uneasily, but still endearingly, with the psychological-journey plot, which functions within greater myths and metaphors, and peaks with a stunner of a sequence where Kat confronts the shadowy memories, both good and bad, that haunt her. (Selick executed a few similarly surreal moments in Coraline, cementing it as a classic.)

Visually, the film is almost wholly comprised with stuff we haven’t seen before: a whimsically lunatic vision of Hell, the near-cubist perspectives on the title characters’ angular faces, a strangely funny depiction of the exhumation and reanimation of desiccated skeletal corpses. Oh, and representation, loads of it. Key and Peele meet expectations by sharing a nutty rapport; the ripping soundtrack defies them with an eclectic blend of outsider rock ranging from funk-metal wackos Fishbone to Detroit proto-punkers Death. And its subtext – about the value of moving on from past traumas, and embracing rebellion and tradition equally – is fresh and inspired, because if we have to sit through yet another family movie about the importance of family and/or being true to yourself, we may need to kick it straight down the hole to you-know-where. Ol’ Belzer can have ’em.

Our Call: STREAM IT.Wendell and Wild overcomes its weaknesses with relentless, unapologetic creativity.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.