“Wildwood,” Laika’s stop-motion animated fantasy based on the book series by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, opens in theaters this weekend. It’s a staggering technical achievement, with principal photography taking more than six years, utilizing dozens of puppets, including one character The General, a majestic golden eagle, that required 3,794 individually placed feathers. But sitting quietlyamong these overwhelming details (137 sets, including five for the climactic battle alone!) is the fact that “Wildwood” is also the first mainstream Western animated movie to be rated PG-13.
This might seem like a small detail, easy to miss amongst everything else, but it’s key to understanding the acclaimed movie’s critical appeal (it has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and, potentially, the future of animation.
“Animation is a medium, not a genre, and certainly not an age category,’ Laika Chief Marketing and Operations Officer David Burke told TheWrap. “At Laika, we’ve always believed that animated films can be as emotionally complex, visually ambitious and narratively sophisticated as any other form of cinema. We didn’t approach ‘Wildwood’ with a particular rating in mind. We approached it with a commitment to telling the story as fully and honestly as possible.”
Western animation — but more specifically American animation — has been divided almost exclusively down the middle: mainstream animation is typically rated G or PG; this encourages all ages to attend the film and includes pretty much every movie ever released by powerhouses DreamWorks, Pixar, Illumination and Walt Disney Animation Studios. These films are designed with families in mind, but also appeal to older members of the family or those without children who just love animation.
On the other side, domestically, is harder, R-rated animated fare. This is typically outrageous comedies, like “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” “Sausage Party” and, more recently, “Fixed,” which was produced by Sony Pictures Animation and New Line Cinema and ultimately debuted on Netflix after New Line pulled out of releasing it. This year’s brilliant black-and-white Alzheimer’s drama “Tangles” will receive an R, mostly due to language.
But in the slippery in-between, where most live-action movies sit comfortably and successfully, a place where the PG-13-rated “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” can gross $2.51 billion (including $958 million from North America alone), mainstream animation is all but forbidden.
And while “Wildwood” was able to gamely secure a PG-13 rating (for, as the MPA put it, “strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language”), two of the year’s other big animated movies, Netflix and Skydance Animation’s sci-fi noir “Ray Gunn” and DreamWorks Animation’s “Forgotten Island,” both had to trim their content to avoid a PG-13.
It’s emblematic of an odd double standard and a dogged effort to keep animation infantilized in the West, while around the world, all sorts of stories (for all sorts of audiences) are being produced and flourishing, particularly in Japan. This is where animation is seen as a true art form, where visionaries like Hayao Miyazaki make wartime fables that win Academy Awards and where a “Demon Slayer” movie, rated R in the U.S., can gross more than $820 million globally.
But Western animation is largely produced by major studios unwilling to risk hundreds of millions of dollars on potentially limiting the reach of their animated film, and so they purposefully skew the content younger, creating something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are few box office success stories of PG-13 Western animated films because there are so few PG-13 Western animated movies made. All of this despite the oversized success of Marvel Studios movies, which extensively feature animation, and James Cameron’s “Avatar” films, which have enough animation to qualify them for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.
Shannon Tindle, who directed “Ultraman: Rising” for Netflix and whose next project is an R-rated animated “John Wick” prequel for Lionsgate and Thunder Road, said that the lack of PG-13 animated films has to do with the medium being kept, in America, in a box. But as Guillermo del Toro said on the path to his Oscar-winning “Pinocchio,” “Animation is film.”
“In this country, animation is, unfortunately, seen almost entirely as a children’s medium – not even a family medium, a children’s medium,” said Tindle. “Marvel movies are considered family films, but a lot of them are PG-13. But I believe the ratings board rates animated films much more strictly than live-action movies. You can have a PG-13-rated movie with one F-bomb. But if you put it in an animated movie, you’d get an R-rating.”
But as Western Gen Alpha and Gen Z viewers raised on Japanese animation that more willingly grapples with complex themes and franker depictions of sex and violence grow up, they will be looking to mainstream animation to grow with them, representing a potentially untapped segment.
So when will mainstream animation studios catch up?
A brief history of PG-13 animation
There have, historically, been only a handful of PG-13-rated animated features produced by American studios since the rating was introduced in the 1980s – among them were 1992’s “Bebe’s Kids,” based on a stand-up routine by Robin Harris (it was originally meant as a live-action feature until Harris tragically passed in 1990) and 1996’s “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” which, like “Bebe’s Kids,” was released by Paramount.
Other PG-13 animated films followed that decade, including Adam Sandler’s “Eight Crazy Nights” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Beowulf,” whose original theatrical plan had two separate versions being released – a PG-13-rated version for normal theaters and an R-rated version for Imax — but failed to turn a profit. The same year as “Beowulf,” “The Simpsons Movie” was released and became the rare PG-13 success, making more than $536.4 million worldwide. And that’s a movie that includes an unobscured view of Bart’s penis!
Since then, only a handful of PG-13-rated animated features have been made here, including Shane Acker’s “9,” Wes Anderson’s stop-motion marvel “Isle of Dogs” and “The Bob’s Burgers Movie,” which followed “The Simpsons Movie” formula but wasn’t a hit. Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” and Henry Selick’s “Wendell & Wild” were also PG-13 but barely played any theaters, instead heading straight to Netflix.
There have also been a handful of international films that, when released here, garnered a PG-13 rating.
“It’s meant for kids”
In 2019, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, Sony Pictures Animation laid out an ambitious plan for the next few years, including something that Sony Pictures Animation head Kristine Belson described as its “alternative initiative,” which would include the PG-13-rated “Black Knight,” from celebrated filmmaker Genndy Tartakovsky. The idea, at the time, was for Sony Pictures Animation, known for its inventiveness and willingness to embrace disparate tones and styles in films like the “Spider-Verse” movies and “Hotel Transylvania,” to own the PG-13 animation space.
And while the strategies outlined in that presentation have obviously shifted, its willingness to experiment has not. Now according to one Sony Pictures Animation insider, the studio is “not opposed” to a PG-13-rated animated feature. Should an animated feature come in at a PG-13, the studiowould use it as a selling point — a feature and not a bug. A way of further setting Sony Pictures Animation apart from the pack.
“Black Knight” hasn’t been made, despite some truly impressive test footage appearing online. Maybe it never will. At least Tartakovsky got to make “Fixed.”
There are also strange carveouts that make certain things OK in animated films, like the surprisingly sophisticated “Transformers” animated film, “Transformers One,” which ends with a violent confrontation and a character fully dying and going into a cybernetic afterlife. It was allowed, according to some who worked on the film, because they were robots. There was no blood (maybe some motor oil). There was no real mortal danger. They could simply be rebuilt or reprogrammed or something.
Still, the biases remain.
“As is mostly the case with animated films, there are prejudices against it because it’s meant for kids,” said Tindle.
“General audiences and Hollywood think of animation as the kid’s table. Animation on VHS became babysitters for a generation. Plop the kid down and let them look at the flashing colors,” added another director who has worked in animation and live-action. “PG-13 animated movies have that mindset to overcome. But when an audience has made up their mind about something, it’s hard to sway them. And that can be an expensive risk that execs don’t want to gamble their position on.”
Trimming “Ray Gunn” and “Forgotten Island”
While “Wildwood” kept its PG-13 rating intact, two more animated movies this fall went a different route. “Forgotten Island” and “Ray Gunn,” even though they are aimed at very different audiences and received their harder rating for different reasons, underwent some surgical trims to get their PGs.
In the case of “Forgotten Island,” the ratings board had an issue with the language of the film, which was too salty for their taste. The movie follows two best friends in the Philippines who travel to a mythological land, where they meet crazy characters and also attempt to regain their memory. Along with references to Japanese animation, the film leans heavily on R-rated comedies like “The Hangover,” “Superbad” and “Dazed and Confused.”
According to oneage characters said “sucks” — something they likely wouldn’t blink at if the movie was live-action. “Forgotten Island” was going for a slightly wilder edge; the filmmakers would often say the movie is a “hard PG.” (Contractually, the “Forgotten Island” filmmakers had to deliver a PG.)
“There’s been a shift with a lot of anime making its way to the mainstream, it’s not just kids who animated movies are aimed at in the West. ‘Forgotten Island’ is not aimed young. It’s accessible for everybody, but there’s a sophistication and an edgier feel to it,” Joel Crawford, one of the directors of “Forgotten Island,” said in an interview posted to X. “I think that we could soon have mainstream PG-13 animated films just in the same way that people will go to a Marvel movie with kids and feel that’s OK. It’s the same material; it’s just animated. Breaking those expectations from the past is where we want to see it go.”
Given the disappointing box office of “Forgotten Island,” which amassed just $62 million worldwide on a budget of around $80 million despite glowing reviews, some DreamWorks insiders wonder whether they should have just let Crawford and fellow writer/director Januel Mercado make the movie they wanted to make. The thought is that, if it had secured a PG-13, Universal would have had to market it differently and, perhaps, more successfully.
At the very least the PG-13 would have set it apart from similar animated fare in the marketplace.
It’s more complicated with writer/director Brad Bird’s “Ray Gunn,” from Skydance Animation and Netflix, which is a moody neo-noir set in a utopian city as imagined by pre-World War II futurists. The title character (voiced by Sam Rockwell, who also stars in DreamWorks’ PG-rated “Bad Guys” movies) is the last human private eye and stumbles onto a vast conspiracy. It has more in common with “Chinatown” or “The Long Goodbye” than with any other animated movie released this year (or any year, really).
On the red carpet at the BFI London Film Festival premiere of “Ray Gunn,” Bird told a reporter, “Animation is often assumed to be a children’s medium and I’ve bitterly fought against that — everything from ‘The Simpsons’ to having the Cold War show its face in ‘The Iron Giant,’ a midlife crisis in ‘The Incredibles.’ I want to get the person who thinks they’ve outgrown animation. It’s like, ‘No, no, no. If we don’t hook you in five minutes, OK.'”
And, avoiding spoilers (the movie is in theaters on Dec. 4 and on Netflix Dec. 18), “Ray Gunn” ran into trouble in a couple of instances of violence. None of it was graphic; there was never any blood. But there was a moment that was inherently cinematic that had to be cut out completely, with other instances toned down.
The reason for this movie’s softening, according to a person familiar with the situation, is that if “Ray Gunn,” a labyrinthine mystery that probably wouldn’t appeal to kids under the age of 13 anyway, were rated PG-13, then it could not exist on the “Kids & Family” hub on the Netflix homepage. This real estate is hugely important to Netflix, and even though Bird didn’t have to deliver a PG-rated film, it was strongly encouraged that he do so in order for the film to be visible as widely as possible on the megastreamer.
Something similar happened with Pixar’s “Lightyear,” which was age-gated for viewers under seven on Disney+, although according to someone who worked on the film, other PG-rated Pixar movies like “Finding Dory” were still available. They imagine that the film was hidden due to the silly controversy surrounding the movie’s same-sex kiss. Because God forbid someone under the age of seven be exposed to a consensual romantic relationship.
And while the PG-rated “Ray Gunn” is the version that will be released this winter (and is, we should add, excellent), there is still hope that the harder cut gets released someday. If Netflix let Zack Snyder put out two versions of his “Rebel Moon” movies (in all-audience PG-13 and hardcore R editions), what’s stopping Netflix from supplying a slightly more intense version of “Ray Gunn” on the service?
But at least we are getting “Wildwood,” in all its PG-13 glory, full of battle sequences worthy of “Lord of the Rings” and complex emotional baggage.
“‘Wildwood’ is an epic fantasy adventure. There’s genuine danger, there are real emotional stakes, but there’s also tremendous wonder, humor and heart. Those elements aren’t in conflict with one another. They’re what give the story its power,” said Laika’s Burke. “The PG-13 rating reflects the nature of the story we chose to tell, rather than an audience we were trying to exclude. We believe great storytelling can resonate across generations, and we’ve never felt that animation should be limited in the kinds of stories it can tell.”
And while “Wildwood” could open the floodgates to other mainstream animated films receiving a PG-13 if it’s a financial success, some filmmakers remain skeptical.
“Audiences are not conditioned for this so they tend to not show up. Big anime IP aside of course. Until we have a major mainstream success, I don’t see this changing,” said Jorge Gutierrez, director of “The Book of Life” and “Maya and the Three.” “But I know someone will eventually break through and reap the rewards. Courage, Hollywood!”
Courage indeed.
