LAIKA's Wildwood Is 100 Percent on Rotten Tomatoes and Rated PG-13. Critics Love It. They Also Say Leave the Little Kids at Home.

LAIKA has not released a movie since Missing Link in 2019. Its sixth feature, Wildwood, opens Friday, October 23, and the reviews from its London Film Festival premiere are the best the stop-motion studio has ever had. As of Tuesday, all 29 critics counted on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, with an average rating of 8.7 out of 10. Metacritic has it at 86.

No LAIKA film has had a perfect score before; Kubo and the Two Strings topped out at 97 percent. Wildwood is also the studio's first PG-13, and at 132 minutes it runs half an hour longer than anything LAIKA has made. If you are deciding who to take, those facts matter as much as the score.

What Wildwood is

Travis Knight, LAIKA's CEO and the director of Kubo, adapts the 2011 novel by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, from a script by Chris Butler (ParaNorman). It starts in Portland, Oregon, the city LAIKA calls home.

Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is minding her baby brother when a murder of crows carries him into the Impassable Wilderness, the forbidden forest at the edge of town. She follows with her nerdy classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) into a world of talking animals, giant birds and bandits, where a grieving, ruthless witch named Alexandra (Carey Mulligan) commands an army of uniformed coyotes.

Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Charlie Day, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant fill out the voice cast. Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) shot it, his first animated film.

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What critics love: you can see the hands

The praise starts with scale. Variety's Guy Lodge calls it "a lovingly tactile and thumbprinted feat of stop-motion artistry on a scale rarely seen in the medium" and, in sum, "a spectacular success." The Telegraph went further: "I think I've just seen the most beautiful stop-motion film ever made."

Empire's John Nugent gave it five stars and hears Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke in its tone, "mysterious and moody and bloody." His verdict: "like all great animation, it makes you believe in magic."

Several reviews frame it against AI. Lodge spots a sign at a Portland potter's stall early on: "Enjoy handmade art before it's gone forever." TheWrap's William Bibbiani opens with an argument about generated art, then declares, "Travis Knight's Wildwood is that humanity."

It's among the best animated films in recent memory.Alistair Ryder, The Film Stage

What 100 percent does not mean

A perfect score means every counted critic gave a passing grade, not that every critic was knocked flat. IndieWire's David Ehrlich gave it a B-minus and The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw three stars out of five. The 8.7 average is the stronger signal. Kubo sits at 8.4.

The complaints are consistent. One is the story: Lodge finds C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Labyrinth in Meloy's book and calls the film "somewhat more generic than we've come to expect from the Laika playbook." Bibbiani calls Alexandra "C.S. Lewis' White Witch with a heartbreaking backstory," a fair warm-up for Greta Gerwig's Narnia movie in February.

The other is length. Lodge says the runtime "is not altogether necessary," and Collider's Aidan Kelley, who calls it LAIKA's "technical masterpiece," still finds it "just a hair too long." Inverse and Collider both say it is the longest stop-motion feature ever made.

The PG-13 is earned. Plan accordingly

Every earlier LAIKA film, Coraline included, was rated PG. The MPA gave Wildwood a PG-13 for "strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide related material, brief partial nudity and language."

Critics say the rating means it. The film opens with a boy leaping to his death from a castle terrace (he turns out to be an android), and Variety warns of "a degree of bloodshed and emotional intensity not to be ignored by parents." Empire counts "the kind of body count normally found in a 1980s Arnie actioner" and calls it "definitely not suitable for very young kids."

Collider's Kelley is the most practical. Nothing in it would surprise you in an average Marvel movie, he writes, but those with younger children "might want to stay home and watch Toy Story 5 instead" (it is now on Disney+). Kids who handle PG-13 superhero fights can probably handle this, but the suicide imagery deserves a heads-up.

Where it fits in LAIKA's run

LAIKA, owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and run by his son Travis, has made six features in 17 years. All five before Wildwood were Oscar nominees for best animated feature; none won. Rotten Tomatoes scores and US openings (per Box Office Mojo):

• Coraline (2009): 91 percent, $16.8 million opening
• ParaNorman (2012): 89 percent, $14.1 million
• The Boxtrolls (2014): 78 percent, $17.3 million, the studio's best start
• Kubo and the Two Strings (2016): 97 percent, $12.6 million
• Missing Link (2019): 88 percent, $5.9 million, the studio's worst start
• Wildwood (2026): 100 percent from 29 reviews, opens October 23

With critics, LAIKA has never really missed. At the box office it has been far less steady: Kubo made $76.3 million worldwide, and Missing Link just $26.6 million.

The box office question

Wildwood is going out without a studio partner. Focus Features released LAIKA's first four films. This time the US distributor is Fathom Entertainment, the theater-chain-owned company best known for one-night event screenings. Its calling card is Coraline: Fathom says its 2024 anniversary re-release made $56 million worldwide.

Tracking was soft before the reviews landed. On October 9, Boxoffice Pro cut its opening forecast to $6 million to $10 million, from $10 million to $15 million a week earlier, which would put it near Missing Link at the bottom of LAIKA's openings. Reviews like these can move numbers, but a 132-minute PG-13 fantasy is a hard sell to the family audience animation leans on.

It has company, too. DC's R-rated Clayface opens the same day with forecasts between $20 million and $33 million (see our Clayface preview), and Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun arrives at 29 percent.

Should you see it?

Then decide where it lands. Better than Coraline? Than Kubo? That is a head-to-head question, which is how Shortlist ranks movies: two at a time, until your list builds itself. Our movie tier list guide shows how, and our October theatrical guide has the rest of the month.

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