Directed by: Henry Selick
Starring: Lyric Ross, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Angela Bassett, Sam Zelaya
Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
Cinematic history is littered with auteurs—think Kurasawa and Kubrick, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese—filmmakers whose bodies of work constitute entire genres unto themselves. The very word “auteur” is perhaps outdated now, having emerged back when the prevailing wisdom was that a director or producer could have such control over a film’s look and feel as to be its singular, authorial creator. It’s a term that arguably ignores the work of actors, artists, designers, photographers, and crew members, without whom no film can be made. Still, the idea that some filmmakers leave a recognizable fingerprint across their work is useful, if nothing else than for sorting through the unbelievable quantity of films at our fingertips in the modern age.
Jordan Peele, just a few films into his career, is already another of these filmmakers with a distinctive fingerprint. His features thus far (starting with his 2017 opus “Get Out”) have depicted, with “Twilight Zone” sci-fi and horror sendups, the uncanny valley that is the experience of Black Americans in the 21st century. “Wendell & Wild,” which Peele co-wrote and co-produced, is a curious addition to his filmography, not because it diverges from the running themes of his other films—it doesn’t—but because it is also a spiritual descendant of the work of yet another filmmaker who falls into the old tradition of the auteurs: Tim Burton.
Look no further than this movie’s pedigree. Director Henry Selick, who co-wrote and co-produced the film with Peele, also directed Tim Burton’s most famous project, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” (One has to wonder why it isn’t Selick who became a household name; such is the fallacy of the “auteur.”) The visual parallels are obvious, and the wintry setting and ghostly plot of “Wendell & Wild” also recall “Nightmare,” but inflected with Peele’s narrative sensibilities. Consider that the only character in “The Nightmare Before Christmas” voiced by a Black actor was the villainous Oogie Boogie; Peele and Selick have here rendered that same gothic fantasy atmosphere in a world as ethnically diverse as our own.
Peele and his longtime comedy collaborator Keegan-Michael Key voice the titular brothers from the underworld. The two mischievous layabouts devise a plan to ascend to the land of the living, collect some quick cash by performing raising-the-dead miracles, and use the capital to build an amusement park. Their plan hinges on the cooperation of one Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross, “This Is Us”), a troubled teenager suffering from years of trauma and shame over the deaths of her parents in a car accident in which she herself nearly died. The bleak and economically depressed town where she lives has also fallen onto hard times, with the nefarious Klaxon Korp aggressively pushing to pave it over and erect a private prison in its place.
Despite the grim setting, the film is full of slapstick and visual exaggeration, making good on its stop-motion animation with a bevy of charming character designs and entertaining gags. Key and Peele prove the most entertaining members of the cast, leaning into their devious characters with a sly goofiness that belies just how crafty Wendell and Wild are. In one scene, they sculpt their own facsimiles out of snot in order to prevent their father, the lord of the underworld, from noticing they’ve snuck off. “Did I make a sculpture, or a mirror?” Wendell asks, admiring his handiwork. “I’m doing something important,” Wild mutters to himself.
Elsewhere, however, the story’s ambitious sprawl—including the affairs of a cash-strapped city council, parochial school management, and various magical “rules of the universe” that go unexplained—leaves things jumbled or half-baked. The film’s comments on issues like the school-to-prison pipeline or the grief of children are incisive, delivered without pandering or condescending to a younger audience, but the story’s resolution on these matters is so easily reached as to be disingenuous. Saddled with these structural issues and a host of low-energy performances besides, the film sometimes falls flat in ways that its vibrant animations can’t cover up.
Despite these imperfections, “Wendell & Wild” is still a curious little movie, occupying an as-yet unfilled niche between the unsettling American landscapes of Jordan Peele’s previous films and the unsettling animated landscapes of Tim Burton’s. It is, anyway, an irreverent film; like the two brothers reanimating corpses with impish delight, “Wendell & Wild” revives a style decades after its heyday and dances with the bones.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/4/22.