*Premise spoilers.*
It wouldn’t have occurred to me for Henry Selick and Jordan Peele to combine forces, but the team-up works pretty well together. Take Peele’s complex themes and penchant for the unnerving, paired with Selick’s artistry and masterful command of stop motion, and you’re left with quite the film.
Since the deaths of her parents, everything in Kat’s life has been tough. She’s recently been paroled from juvie and sent to a Catholic school as part of the “Break the Cycle” program, but her first day doesn’t quite go as she expected. Chiefly, there’s the small matter of getting marked as a Hell Maiden with the ability to summon demons. Wendell and Wild, two dissatisfied demons eager for a ticket to the surface world, promise Kat something enormous if she summons them up top: they’ll restore her parents for her.
For a movie that’s under two hours long, there’s a lot going on here, and that summary doesn’t cover it all. There’s also Kat’s return to her shriveling hometown, a pair of nefarious businesspeople working to secure permits for a private prison, a tube of magical hair cream, and a demon-hunting custodian, just to name a few. As a result, the film can feel overly busy at times, and it takes a while for things to come together.
That said, I do enjoy it quite a bit. Kat is a deeply compelling character, a girl who’s been dealt a lot of hurt in her life. She puts her guard up to anyone who shows her kindness in the present, but she’s so desperate for what’s lost in her past that she’ll make deals with literal demons in the hope of getting it back. Her hard edges are protecting a lot of pain, and the movie allows both her circumstances and her actions to be richly complicated.
“Complicated” describes many of the film’s characters. Wendell and Wild are an endearing pair of comedy demons with their own dreams, but they’re taking advantage of a traumatized girl in order to get what they want. Kat immediately turns up her nose as the “poodles,” the trio of popular girls roaming the halls of the school, but far from being the typical mean girls, her biggest issue with them is that they want to be her friends. The priest who runs the school isn’t afraid to get involved in some shady dealings in order to maintain his funding, but in his mind, it’s a necessary evil to continue providing a good school for these girls.
Less complicated is Raul, a kind, artistic trans boy who winds up getting pulled into Kat’s demon-summoning. I appreciate that he’s a bit lonely but not an outcast, and I’m a fan of his overstressed but supportive mom. He’s certainly the glue of the movie, and part of Kat’s journey throughout the film is to learn how to recognize the true friendship he’s offering.
While I don’t see this film unseating The Nightmare Before Christmas anytime soon, the stop motion work is simply wonderful. All the characters are well rendered—I love Kat’s green afro puffs—and the animation offers up some really intricate details, such as the paper models Wendell and Wild make. The best scene in the film has almost no dialogue, instead relying on the magnificent, emotional stop motion depiction of Kat’s life between her parents’ death and the present.
The diverse voice cast turn in nice performances, especially Lyric Ross as Kat and Sam Zelaya as Raul. Any chance for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele to work together is a good thing, and they’re a lot of fun as Wendell and Wild, respectively. The film also features the voices of Angela Bassett, the iconic James Hong, David Harwood (J’onn J’onzz!), and Maxine Peake, who I always remember best as Veronica on the U.K. Shameless.
Warnings
Strong thematic elements, scenes of violence, some language, gross-out humor, scary moments for kids, and dark imagery.
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