Wendell & Wild

A lonely orphan. A strange, old-fashioned boarding school. The discovery of unexpected magical powers. Does this sound familiar? It has been the stuff of popular children’s books for almost a century, but this animated feature from Henry Selick, co-written by Jordan Peele, does it a litlle differently. 13-year-old Kat (voiced by Lyric Ross) is a troubled kid who blames herself for the car crash which killed her parents, and has repeatedly acted out as a result. Due to this, she has been passed around in the system from one place to another, nobody really willing to do the work to help her recover. Now she’s at the final stage, placed into the care of nuns, told to be on her best behaviour. It’s a somewhat awkward situation in which to discover that one is a hellmaiden.

A what now? Oh yes. Young Kat possesses a rare gift: the ability to summon demons and make them manifest in the real world. This is a quality seized upon by Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Jordan Peele himself), two frustrated demons who want to escape their dead-end job applying hair cream to Satan’s scalp and start their own business running a theme park on Earth. Realising that the said hair cream can be used to resurrect not just follicles but also human beings, they plan to raise the money for their theme park by charging for the service. Kat, naturally, wants her parents back, but once summoned, the demonic duo soon starts talking to sinister local family the Klaxons, whose industrial ambitions could destroy the area which she once called home.

Wanting to deal with the demons but horrified by this plan, Kat finds unexpected allies in the shape of a nun with a secret mission (Angela Bassett), a mysterious doctor fascinated by the occult (Joseph Tran), and a goth boy (Sam Zelaya) with a crush which is obvious to everyone but her. There are assorted crosses and double crosses, and even Satan himself (Ving Rhames) doesn’t behave quite as you might expect. Family values sit side by side with the importance of growing up, coming to terms with losses and accepting responsibilities – all within a story full of necromancy, zombies, political corruption and capitalist greed.

The problem with it is that with so much going on, there simply isn’t time to develop all the plot strands properly – we see the events but we can’t engage with them emotionally as we might. No time is wasted on characters trying to deny what’s happening around them, but some scenes still feel rushed. With so many characters we don’t have the opportunity to get to know most of them as individuals, and only a few of the actors have sufficient charisma to make them work despite this. The villainous Klaxons are particularly thinly drawn, and despite spirited work from the always excellent Maxine Peake, feel very formulaic.

Balancing this is a spirited performance from Ross, and some great animation, which makes the most of both the spooky and the quirky elements in the story. The underlying mythology is consistent and the animators present a good balance of the charismatic and the grotesque. Kat is styled with a punk sensibility which will appeal to young viewers tired of old fashioned notions about how young heroes ought to look and behave. Watch until the end of the credits to see what she gets up to when the animators are not around.

There’s a lot of good work in this film, and it’s mostly fun to watch despite its problems. A more tightly written sequel which was better able to wake its time would be a delight.