What're you going to do.
I was planning to watch this early enough after it was released to review it, sticking as I do to a policy of putting up reviews at the very latest two weeks after the Australian release date. And in the cases where I do go that long, it's usually to accommodate another writer, who is dawdling on completing their review. Wendell & Wild hit Netflix on October 28th, which is just too long ago.
The reason I didn't review it within that timeframe? My wife came into the living room when I was five minutes in and said "Oh, I thought this was something we might watch with the kids." So I stopped, knowing that meant the death of the review. When we watch something with the kids, my wife never wants to hurry it up so it will happen as soon as I need to write the review. When I try to force it, it never has good results. (If I'd been planning carefully, it could have been part of our October 30th Halloween double feature -- but with two other 2022 movies already lined up, it was just too much.)
If I'd known how it was going to turn out, I would have roused the eight-year-old from bed, watched it that night and given it my glowing review. Now you'll just have to hear me talk about it glowingly here as a secondary outcome to why I'm writing about the movie today.
After the two (semi) haters had shuffled out of the room, I mentioned to my younger son that we should watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, another Henry Selick film, especially considering that this was the season for it. Delving further, I discovered that he might have enjoyed Wendell & Wild as much as he did in spite of the stop-motion animation, not because of it. We will definitely watch it anyway.
During my pitch I said "You'll like it, it has ghosts and goblins in it too."
Ghosts and goblins. It's a phrase that probably comes from my childhood, that people a generation younger than us don't use. But without ever having specifically thought about it before, I'm pretty sure it's a phrase that extends beyond my own house or immediate circle of influence when I was a young person. I feel like it's a general phrase we use to describe any content in any medium featuring the macabre supernatural -- in movies, anything you might watch at Halloween, more likely something directed at children.
The reason for the phrase is obvious: alliteration. And it's got to be the sound it has in common, not just the spelling. That's why we don't say "ghosts and gnomes."
But it occurred to me for the first time last night:
There are a shit ton of movies about ghosts, but almost none about goblins.
If you are going to consider Wikipedia a nearly exhaustive resource, which it usually is, the Wikipedia category "Goblin films" includes a mere nine titles:
The Black Cauldron
Goblin
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hobgoblins
Labyrinth
Scooby Doo! And the Goblin King
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Strange Magic
Troll 2
And that's not just some superficial list of only movies with "goblin" in the title. They've gone one level deeper and considered whether goblins actually appear in the story. I've seen more than half of these movies but wouldn't have remembered that goblins were in most of them. And while there are surely some missing, you wouldn't say that number would be more than a dozen or two.
The category "Ghost films" on Wikipedia?
For starters it takes you to a page with eight different subcategories, then also a flat list that currently has *copies to Excel* 526 titles on it. And you'd have to say the actual number might be higher by orders of magnitude.
So clearly ghosts and goblins are not on equal footing here.
Of course it's easy to identify what's going on when we use that phrase. In order to make the alliteration work, we are not referring to a goblin literally as a "small, grotesque, monstrous creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures." (Thanks again Wikipedia for that definition.) No, it's a catch-all term to describe ghouls, trolls, gnomes, leprechauns, gremlins, ogres, and a half-dozen others on a taxonomy of creatures who go "boogedy boo." Most people probably don't know what a goblin actually is -- a hand wave is good enough.
Well there are definitely ghosts and goblins in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and within a few weeks, we'll discover whether my son likes a movie like this because of or in spite of its animation ... or even likes it at all. (I always found this movie something less than perfectly great. I mean, did they really have to torture Santa Claus on a rack?)
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