Wild Style

We're not big fans of Henry Sellick, but we did watch his Wendell & Wild (2022). If you don't know Sellick, I'd be in the same boat. except the Blank Check podcast did a series on him. He's the stop-motion director who made Nightmare Before Christmas but producer Tim Burton got all the credit. We didn't see that, but liked Coraline, so we figured, why not?

It starts with little stop-motion animated black girl Lyric Ross enjoying a street fair with her parents. The parents own the root beer brewery that the town's prosperity revolves around. On the way home, while their car is crossing a bridge, Ross bites into a caramel apple and screams when she finds a worm. This distracts her dad, and the car goes into the river. Only Ross survives.

Then we meet Wendell and Wild, two demons played by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. They operate a hair plug contraption drawn by a giant tardigrade on the scalp of a giant demon, Buffalo Blezer, voiced by Ving Rhames. Peele keeps squirting the hair growth cream into his mouth because it gets him high, and when Key gets some, they see a vision of Ross.

A few years later, Ross has become a rough juvenile delinquent, tortured by grief and guilt for the death of her parents. Her indigenous family friend, Tantoo Cardinal, is taking her back to her home town for a last-chance entollment in a Catholic girl's school. It's run by an old priest (James Hong) and a nun (Angela Bassett). She meets a trio of "mean girls", who are actually kind of nice - when Ross shoves the ringleader, it coincidentally pushes her out of the way of a falling brick, so now the thinks Ross saved her life. Oh, and the brick fell because Raul (ex-Ramona), a trans boy who feels left out in this all-girls environment (the clique doesn't actually exclude him, but does dead-name him "accidentally"). 

This school isn't too bad, but the whole town has fallen apart since the root beer brewery burned down. The land has been bought by an evil corporation for a for-profit prison. 

Around about this time, Wendell and Wild decide that she is their "hell-maiden" (lore on this TBD) who can bring them to Earth so that they can build their amusement park (long story). When she does, her price is that they bring her parents back to life. Wendell tells Wild, "We don't know how to do that!" and Wild replies "But we do know how to lie". But it turns out that hallucinogenic hair cream actually can bring the dead back to life, so they are all set.

Following this? OK, it turns out that Evil Corp is run by the parents of the lead mean girl. They look like a Spiiting Image version of Joanna Lumley and a black Boris Johnson. They were the ones who burned down the brewery, and the priest knows it so they kill him.  But Wendell and Wild test the cream on him, so he comes back to life. 

There is a lot more here - this is a very plot-heavy, theme-rich movie. For example, I've left out the whole Afro-punk theme: Ross and her parents are into Fishbone, Death, X-Ray Spex, and there's a ton of it on the soundtrack. (Remember that other Black lead movie that featured X-Ray Spex?) I'd tell you about the demon hunter in the school basement modeled on older Marlon Brando - if I could figure him out. But, really, there's too much for me to really get into here. In fact, that might be what torpedoed this movie - it didn't get much attention or love, and it might have just been too dense.

But it had a really interesting look. Lyric Ross' face looks something like an African mask. Wendell and Wild look like construction paper sculptures of Key and Peele. In general, I'd say the look combines Constructivism with African Primitivism. Kind of odd inspirations for stop-motion animation - but cool. Also, the cast and characters are very diverse - most are Black, indigenous, Latin, Middle Eastern, etc. The priest seems to be Euro, but is played by Asian James Hong. I know this sounds "woke", but it's just refreshing.

In conclusion, the mean girl clique in this movie were much better that in that last one.