🍿 2022-11-07 12:37:30 – Paris/France.
Wendell and savage is the return behind the cameras of a filmmaker who made great films but whose name was eclipsed by Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman respectively in his two best works, Nightmare before christmas Yes Coraline. We are, of course, talking about Henry Selick. In this case, he was no luckier, as the film was one of Netflix's great failures despite the signature animation style that has earned it so much success in the past. But… what is it? Wendell and savage? Does it deserve more attention? Join us on this hellish journey to find out.
Wendell and savage
The film tells the story of Kat, a girl whose parents died in a car accident and whose brewery was destroyed in a mysterious fire. She will end up institutionalized in an elite school that seeks to reform her after a troubled childhood, but she will soon discover that there is a plot that threatens to destroy her hometown to build a pharaonic prison on its foundations.
At the same time we will meet Wendell and savage, two imps who have been condemned by their father to eternal servitude. Luckily for them, they discover that Kat has great potential as a medium between hell and the world of the living. They try to take advantage of the girl's powers, promising to resurrect her parents, but an unexpected encounter causes them to rethink their loyalties...
hell on earth
Wendell and savage It's a film with very good ideas, with attractive character designs and more than professional cinematography. It is above all a story created with the heart, and an idea that its creator has been trying to realize for years. However, having been hanging out with his former collaborator Tim Burton for some time, Selick seems to have lost the ability to tell a good story. Not even the part of jordan peele in the script, he manages to make us catch the diabolical ideas of this filmmaker.
Despite a good start and a very charismatic protagonist, the story suffers from serious problems, and the most important is the excess of characters and subplots. We have barely finished meeting a secondary that we are presented with another, which reduces the presence of characters who had great potential but who end up being reduced to cameos or drawings with personality but without substance behind. Sometimes the overabundance of actors in this drama makes Wendell and savage It sounds like a Dickens novel, and not in a good way.
The main plot is also affected by the determination of those responsible for covering everything: the film does not give us time to breathe and process its revelations before moving on to the next scene, which leaves the viewer overwhelmed by the nearly two hours of sensory stimulation. If the hectic plot is difficult for an adult to follow, I don't want to imagine what it will be for a child.
Worse, conflicts are resolved with insulting ease, with a rushed ending in which the script tries to close all the storylines that had been presented so far. The humour, which should serve to offer a counterpoint to the darkness of the argument, is not always right, and the moments which should cause a lump in the throat are quickly swept away by a chaotic succession of events which do not matter to us. .
conclusion
The mythical Don Bluth based his career on a very nuanced but essentially correct philosophy: kids can handle anything in a movie as long as there's a happy ending. In this band there murders, pacts with the devil and the living deadbut the little ones can enjoy it, as happened with Nightmare before christmas or the different deliveries of the addams family.
However, it is not violence that spoils Wendell and savagebut some creative decisions that are difficult to defend and a hyperactive script that spoils good ideas that Selick had been cultivating for years. I wanted to like this movie, but it turned out to be a huge disappointment.
Netflix did not bet on this feature film. He barely publicized the film and that, obviously, had painful ratings results. Let's just hope that this failure will not deter companies from investing in stop motion, an endangered art. There is a place for this discipline, but not for a film as flawed and unsatisfying as this one.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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