If you’ve heard anything at all about Travis Knight’s stop-motion animated feature Wildwood in the lead-up to its release, it’s probably the astonishing amount of time and effort it took to get made. First announced in 2011, mere weeks after Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy’s bestselling young-adult novel of the same name was published, it’s taken, according to Knight, 16 years to complete, during which time Laika, the animation studio behind Wildwood, has released multiple features, including Knight’s 2016 film Kubo and the Two Strings. Only in 2021 was the director, who’s also Laika’s president and CEO, finally able to start production. The end result of all that time and effort is a technical marvel, to be sure. But this glorious fantasy epic is a triumph on many other levels as well.

As with other fantasy films of this type, the basic storyline revolves around a quest. One day, Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teenager living with her parents (Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson) and baby brother Mac in Portland, Oregon, witnesses a murder of crows snatching Mac from a playground and whisking him into the Impassable Wilderness just outside the city. Despite her parents’ warnings to her and Mac to avoid this enchanted forest, the headstrong Prue—unexpectedly accompanied by the awkward, quietly lovelorn Curtis (Jacob Tremblay)—ventures forth anyway. She discovers not only a world in which humans, sentient plants, and talking animals coexist, but one on the brink of war thanks largely to Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), the exiled Dowager Governess of South Wood, whose grief over her dead son has metastasized into a quest for vengeance marked by her embrace of black magic.

One of the film’s purest pleasures lies in basking in the world Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler, working from Meloy’s source material and Carson Ellis’s original illustrations for the book, have richly imagined for the screen. The supporting cast of characters—including the eagle general (Angela Bassett) of the Avian Principality; a group of Robin Hood–like bandits led by Brendan (Mahershala Ali); the aged hippie Iphigenia (Tantoo Cardinal); and a corrupt governor (Marc Evan Jackson) and his manipulative henchman Roger (Jemaine Clement)—is so wide-ranging that we feel as though we’re seeing a cross-section of an entire society.

That dizzying variety can also be seen in the colors and textures of Wildwood’s imagery, which shift from one corner of this world to the next. The blooming greens of the flora throughout the forest contrast with the hellish murkiness of the Avian Principality and Alexandra’s underground prison, with the Pittock Mansion—the government building in which Prue is temporarily detained—offering a visual middle ground with its drab and earthy tones.

The film’s many world-building details aren’t mere whimsy but correspond to a reality that reflects our own. Significantly, Alexandra and the army of coyotes and crows at her beck and call are technically a minority that nevertheless has a stranglehold on the rest of the Impassable Wilderness. By comparison, the bandits are depicted as a racially, culturally, and even sexually inclusive group, with warrior Niamh (Amandla Stenberg), for instance, seen in one fleeting moment running to embrace a female significant other. There’s even an environmental component, with Iphigenia suggesting at one point that the plants and trees in the Impassable Wilderness take care of the creatures that treat them with respect.

Such gestures toward contemporary relevance never overwhelm the film’s more timeless and universal threads. Prue starts out believing herself wise beyond her years, having long ago dismissed magic to the point of questioning her father’s insistence on repeating the same warnings about the Impassable Wilderness to Mac. Her adventure in that realm, then, is a coming-of-age journey that leads to her opening herself up to a sense of wonder she had lost.

Like Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke, this young-adult film isn’t afraid to have its characters grapple, sometimes brutally, with real-world darkness and complexity. Wildwood climaxes with a full-on battle, as Prue, Curtis, and Mac are thrust into mortal danger. But even when Curtis notches a necessary kill, the filmmakers have him react not with simple-minded heroism but with a shock that suggests a loss of innocence. Rather than dampening the exhilaration of its high-flying action and gorgeous visuals, such mature grace notes add to the film’s resonant, deeply moving vision of characters learning how to balance innocence and experience through a trial-by-fire journey into adulthood.