Recensioni de* critic*

The aesthetic owes something to the macabre DayGlo dark forces of the Oogie Boogie segment of Selick and Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas; the story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.

There’s a certain leap of faith that all of these various parallel plotlines and tones... will eventually join together on a single track without resulting in a trainwreck. That ends up being too huge an ask... It may be that all of this jockeying for screentime and oxygen in one fit-to-burst film isn’t the ideal conduit for everything.

“Wendell & Wild” is as offbeat and personal as the director’s best... For Selick, “animation” is never just about making pictures move. It’s about giving his images a beating heart, alive with the possibility that the weak can be strong, the grotesque can be good and that nothing dies forever.

What may have been appropriately lolled out on paper feels distending within a 105-minute runtime, where big, salient ideas are brought only to a simmer. Selick’s signature fantastication still feels comforting... though all the demonic teddies and X-Ray Spex in the world won’t cloak the orthodoxy of Wendell and Wild’s chief production house.

Wendell & Wild marks the anarchic return of one of the most exciting directors in animation, retooling his idiosyncrasies in service of a boundary-pushing children’s horror with strong political messaging... Time hasn’t dulled the edge found in Selick’s sharp, delightful animated adventures.

Every new character and narrative detail in the film... is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured... Despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.

There’s a tug-of-war between plot and characters that always seems won by the former to the latter’s detriment. If not unforgivable, it is frustrating... The whole is so dense with exposition, themes, and characters it can’t help feeling rushed—even when we’re seemingly given breaks via Wendell and Wild’s comedic “bits.”

In many ways, this film has the creepiness of “The Nightmare Before Christmas fused with the girl-power of ”Coraline” but for less pay-off than either... Beneath it all is the story of a child's love and guilt... but that gets a little lost in the gross-out humor, Addams Family-level weirdness and shock-for-shock’s sake visual gags like a demonic teddy bear.

Wendell & Wild simultaneously falls short of the earnestness of Coraline and lacks the all-out anarchic spirit of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Still, the pacy, wacky action ensures that 106 minutes fly by... A future Halloween classic.

You'll forgive the movie its cluttered shagginess because its universe is so strange — even an icy puddle is rendered exquisitely.

Wendell & Wild is about a lot of things. Too many things, actually. But it’s so packed with gloriously demented visuals and bold thematic swings that try, with varying degrees of success, to lift the film out of the realm of pure fantasy, that we’re not entirely bothered by the convoluted story.

The competing storylines and moods also add to the film’s growing identity crisis—or maybe it’s just that it all feels as if it’s been assembled from disparate parts... [Wendell & Wild] is nothing if not admirably progressive, beginning with its diverse characters... But while these seem spawned from a genuine place, they feel predominantly defined by their narrative function, which only ends up impeding a greater excavation of the urgent anti-capitalist through line lying just beneath the film’s surface.