wildwood

tonight i watched the new movie Wildwood. not only was it made by Laika, the same studio that made Coraline, but it took the studio 16 years to make. it being stop motion, certain sequences took their team 5 years to make individually. that's insane.

the world building was incredible, so detail oriented and at the very end they showed what looks like 100 different faces of these characters, all with different expressions. when you sit there and think beyond the movie, about the creativity and the systems that went into it, they must have had teams set on very specific, literally every tiny detail tasks to make something like this work and become something great, incredible.

this was a great movie, just the pure feeling of being whisked away into this world they created. when the movie ended, i clocked back in, that i wasn't part of this movie, that i wasn't in that world. that's the testament to a great movie. you're not looking down and remembering you're a human watching a story unfold. you feel like you're inside of it, witnessing the unfolding of it. that's how i felt tonight.

i was invested from the jump: the stylistic choices of the characters, the movements, the shot work. when it's not live actors or real people, whether it's animation or any kind of work like this, you can reach for the stars and make your characters move how you want. you don't have to sit inside of a box, and they definitely did not sit inside a box on this one. you've got these characters in a normal world like ours, walking into pure unknown, pure catastrophe, straight war and despair. you're rooting for these characters. it was a real feel good movie.

i need to see it again on the biggest screen possible. IMAX if they have it somewhere. if not, Cinemark XD.