Wendell & Wild (2022)

Wendell & Wild feels like a deliciously oddball gift from Henry Selick: a stop-motion fever dream where every frame looks hand-touched, slightly mischievous, and alive with macabre beauty. It rides a punchy, punk-spirited energy—Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele make the demon brothers charmingly chaotic—while still making room for real emotion as its heroine wrestles with grief and what it means to rebuild a broken town. The movie’s imagination is the main event, piling on inventive character designs, underworld weirdness, and darkly funny set pieces without losing its heart. Fair warning: it’s cheerfully morbid and a bit messy in the way big, ambitious fairy tales can be, but if you like your comedy with shadows and your fantasy with bite, it’s absolutely worth the trip.

Wendell & Wild is clearly trying to be a big, heartfelt stop-motion fantasia: part teen grief story, part demon-buddy comedy, part social satire, with Henry Selick’s wonderfully weird visuals doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem is it crams in so many characters, subplots, and themes that the pacing gets choppy and the movie can feel like it’s sprinting through its own ideas rather than letting any of them land. Tonally, it swings from dark tragedy to jokey chaos to earnest messaging, and while that ambition is admirable, the emotional through-line doesn’t always connect cleanly. If you’re here mainly for tight storytelling and a focused arc, you may leave frustrated—but if you can forgive narrative clutter for inventive animation, spooky-funny creature design, and a few genuinely touching moments, it’s worth a look.