Review: Into the Wonderwoods is a fun journey with a so-so destination

Angelo is a kid who often escapes to the world of his imagination. His life at home can be pretty chaotic: a wailing baby sister, a bully of an older brother, a dad who's a bit clueless, a mom who's busy holding everything together. It's easy to get lost in the whirlwind, to be pushed aside, to be a supporting character. But not in his imaginary worlds, where he's a big, buff explorer who's always on an epic quest, full of action and thrills, suspense, but no romance (ew). Both the chaos of the real world's morning routine and the epic sweep of Angelo's latest imagined adventure are interrupted by a phone call bearing bad news: Angelo's grandma is sick. It's bad. She likely isn't going to make it.

So the family gets in the car and hits the road. And at a pit stop, Angelo gets left behind.

Thus begins an adventure fitting of the kid's imagination, a journey through the forest that is teeming with colorful characters, exotic locales, and plenty of adventure.

Into the Wonderwoods is an utterly charming little adventure that kind of throws everything at you. When I say it's fitting of its little hero's imagination, I mean it in every sense. There are so many shifts in setting, so many characters who pop up in various scenarios, so many weird and silly random bits, it really feels like the filmmakers had a "never say 'no'" attitude while brainstorming, which is a lot of fun. Sure, it makes the proceedings feel a little haphazard at times, but that's not the worst thing when you're on an adventure like this. 

As he journeys through the woods, Angelo finds himself embroiled in an escalating conflict between the villainous Ultra, a short-tempered tech-using alien (?) with an army of cyclops robots that he is quick to dispatch as a result of any minor inconvenience, and the Resistance, a rag-tag group of forest-dwellers who want to save their home from the machines. Ultra is looking for the fabled spring that can heal any malady, even death. Sounds enticing to Angelo, too, since his favorite relative is on her deathbed.

The story moves along at a gallop, with Angelo constantly meeting new friends and foes, sometimes foes-turned-friends, and exploring varied locales. Yeah, it's a forest, but that doesn't mean there can't also be a vast desert or a castle nestled in the snowy mountains. Again, this movie never holds back.

The characters are probably the film's greatest strength. Angelo is adorable, plucky, charming. When he imagines himself as an adventurer, he looks like a beefed-up hero right out of He-Man or a Ralph Bakshi movie. Maybe he doesn't quite have that swagger in real life, but he uses those images to motivate himself, and to shore up his courage. The allies he makes along the way are a lot of fun, like a squirrel who wants to be a bird (love a trans allegory in a family movie) and a wild-maned ogre girl who immediately deems Angelo her boyfriend. You never know who's waiting around the next narrative bend, or what sort of animation will be employed to introduce them. 

While most of the movie is rendered in very nice-looking but largely unexciting CG, there are numerous scenes that take on different aesthetics. Along with the aforementioned Bakshi scenes, there are a couple that take inspiration from rubber hose animation like Fleischer and early Disney, to great effect. There's a bit that has the pixellated look of a video game. And there's one bit that is essentially a slideshow of storyboards that had me wondering if it was an artistic choice or a budget thing. Not sure, but still looked good!

While there's a lot of inventiveness in the character designs and scenarios that come up (watching everyone team up is very exciting), the overall story is a pretty predictable one. And I'm not sure how I feel about the ending, which feels a little like a betrayal of a thesis the film puts forth, but then also sort of feels subversive for doing so? It's a bit of a Schrodinger's Ending, I guess, one that's expected and unexpected at the same time, depending on how you look at it (yeah, I guess my terminology doesn't quite work).

So yeah, maybe the destination isn't that exciting or satisfying, but as the family's car's AI (a strange supporting character in a strange subplot) posits, the journey is more important. And this journey Into the Wonderwoods is a very enjoyable one.

Into the Wonderwoods is available to rent/buy digitally in the US. (And at least on Amazon, there was an option to watch in the original French -- tres bien!)