At SCAD Film Festival, the directors of this year’s animated feature contenders are making films not aimed at children. The MPA gave “Wildwood” a PG-13 for “strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language,” which is a mouthful for any movie and an especially wild one for a stop-motion picture about a girl hunting for her kidnapped baby brother. It’s the first PG-13 in Laika’s 17 years as a feature studio, and at 140 minutes, it ties the record for the longest English-language animated film ever made.
Travis Knight, who runs the Portland, Ore., studio and directed “Wildwood,” didn’t land there by accident. Anyone who remembers how dark the back half of “Kubo and the Two Strings” got probably isn’t shocked he went this far. Knight is one of the filmmakers taking part in this year’s Pixels and Pencils panel, Variety’s animation directors conversation at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, now in its fifth year.
Joining Knight at the event are Brad Bird (“Ray Gunn”), Daniel Chong (“Hoppers”), Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado (“Forgotten Island”) and Leah Nelson (“Tangles”). The SCAD Savannah Film Festival runs Oct. 24-31. The panel has turned into a decent crystal ball leading to the Academy Awards.
The director of “Flow,” Gints Zilbalodis, participated in 2024 before the little indie feature that could upset the big studios for the animated feature Oscar and last year, four of the eventual five nominees at the 98th Academy Awards, including winner “KPop Demon Hunters,” spoke at the event. Since “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” won the animated feature Oscar the 95th ceremony, the trophy hasn’t gone back to Disney or Pixar (“The Boy and the Heron,” “Flow” and “KPop” followed), which is a real shift for a category those two studios have owned since “Shrek” took the first trophy in the category in 2002. But this year, animation’s auteurs are making the movies they want to make.
Bird’s “Ray Gunn” is the easiest place to start, partly because the man has been chasing it since 1996, when a B-52s song and a Henry Mancini tune got tangled in his head and spit out a title. That was three years before “The Iron Giant” bombed at the box office (still a masterpiece, by the way) and then spent the next 25 years becoming the movie an entire generation of dads can’t get through without tearing up. He’s pitched his new film as “The Maltese Falcon” meets “Buck Rogers.” Sam Rockwell is Raymond Gunn, a gumshoe working a murder in Metropia, a version of 1939 that never happened, where humans and aliens share the same smoky streets.
Netflix will release it Dec. 18, after London Film Festival screenings and a limited 70mm run. The PG rating comes with a note about “suggestive material,” which, if you know Bird’s work, tracks. Indeed, the Pixar licensing cash cow and family-friendly adventure “The Incredibles” was about a guy who hates his insurance job and misses his glory days.
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