Wendell and Wild

Review

Wendell and Wild is Jordan Peele’s first animated horror, working with the legendary Henry Selick as the director and with their powers combined it made for a pretty good animated pg-13 horror. This movie was made for the gay people in the audience and I don’t just say that because of the inclusion of Raul. I mean…. a horror movie, animated with stopmotion, with demons, and zombies, and hellish amusment parks, and catholic imagery, and a punk main character, which tackles the prison industrial complex, with pretty solid representation on all fronts as far as I could tell, what more could a gay person want?

This movie is a very beautiful movie, the color schemes are so nice with the base of the movie being primarily built up of purples which gives the town such a creepy vibe. The animation looks great on absolutely all fronts, probably the stand out moments are whenever we’re taking a look into hell and what Belphegor is doing or the moment where Kat confronts her memories and finally accepts what she did and who she is.

I think my biggest issue with the film overall is just that too much is happening. There's so many characters who all have a thing and a moment to shine and when the finale comes around you really start to notice as we resolve this thing, and then this thing, and then Raul’s painting, and then Siobhan’s understanding and protestation of the prison industrial complex and it just ends up feeling very cluttered. Even though this is most notable at the end you can still feel it throughout the rest of film as you ping-pong between the FIVE different groups of people that you have to keep track of, and let me remind you that this film is only an hour and 45 minutes.

Despite there being too many, I really liked the characters in this film. Kat really stood out to me as a unique, troubled protagonist, I really liked Wendell and Wild as two actually trickster demon characters, I thought Belphegor was super cool, and despite him not being super impressive I thought Raul was super sweet and he was my favorite.

I really liked the story despite how cluttered it was and the overall experience was a really fun time. I loved the song at the beginning and wish there was more singing throughout the film. I'm glad I watched this movie, it was a nice way to spend the evening.