Wendell et Wild

When I first saw the trailer, I was really excited for this movie. Henry Selick has made two all-time animated classics with "Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Coraline". Having him team up with Jordan Peele, sounds like a match made in heaven. Ironic comparison given the subject of the movie.

The animation is very distinct. It catches you off guard at first, but you get used to it fairly quick. The movie has a lot of fun and unique characters and create a fascinating world. The characters, animation and moments of humor all work, where does it falter?

The story simply has way too much going on. As the movie tries to juggle these different story points, characters make stupid decisions or unprovoked changes solely for the purpose of moving the story towards a conclusion. And I may have complimented a lot of the characters, but I will say that the villains in this are awful. They are the same old tired villain cliché we've seen a hundred times, with nothing clever or funny to make them stand out.

I like the themes and morals the movie addresses, but just because I like the message, doesn't mean that I liked the way it was presented.

It's a shame because there's a great movie in here, it just doesn't come to its full potential. A good film with just one too many demons holding it back.

I love Henry Selick's work in Stop Motion, Coraline is even one of my all time favorite films, however this new effort has unfortunately left me a little cold.

On the technical side it is certainly something great but the script is really simple with an unbalanced pace.

The ending comes all of a sudden and the viewer is not given time to empathize with what's going on.

The protagonists are nice even if some have a design that didn't drive me crazy. However, the film is not a bad film but thinking about past works it does not even reach those levels a bit.

Such a shame as I was very confident for Wendell & Wild.

I usually love Henry Selick's work. In fact the Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline are two of my favourite movies. But this just didn't hit the mark.

There was far too much going on, and many of the additional story points feel unnecessary, which ultimately ends up taking away from the quality of a film that could've been great, but really wasn't.

This film would've been so much better if the story was simplified and streamlined a bit.

Pretty disappointing overall.

The animation style was nice though, although not my favourite of his work, and it was nice to have diversity in the characters.

The idea of Key&Peele as stop-motion characters was enough to draw me in, the problem with the movie is they're not the main characters even though the title says Wendell & Wild, the main character is the school girl Kat, and because her life's trauma left her cold, she hard to like, the animation has high production value, it looks good, but the story is about too many different things, and the title characters fade into the background, Kat is supposed to be some kind of hell something lol, and her mentor played by Angela Bassett has the same powers but it's not fleshed out enough to understand what the purpose of those powers are, overall a cute Halloween movie for a family to watch, parents turn off your brain and let the kids enjoy the animation.

As a fan of stop-motion animation as well as Keegan Michael-Keys and Jordan Peeles electric chemistry I was greatly anticipating this film when it was announced.

However I was overhyped for its release. The only aspect that is truly outstanding about this movie is stop motion animation.

The story is chaotic and introduces lore without a hint of context. The finale? Condensed. The solutions? Convenient. And for a movie called "Wendell & Wild" the title characters do not get as much screen time as you might imagine. Which is a shame because Key and Peeles voice delivery is stellar.

As a movie? It's middle of the road. As a stop motion movie? It's kinda bad.