If you think you’ve cracked every detail in Wendell & Wild, think again. To all spooky stop-motion enthusiasts, you’ll be delighted to know that tacked on to the film’s almost two-hour runtime is a sneaky post-credit scene with our favorite character.
Following the trials and tribulations of a young hell maiden, Wendell & Wild introduces us to Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross) a teenage, demon-summoning badass who’s on a mission to save her parents and her town with two gloriously chaotic demon brothers, Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Jordan Peele), by her side. The film’s eerily fantastical adventure is beautifully animated through director Henry Selick’s speciality, stop-motion, and its end (and post) credits are all just one giant love letter to the timeless craft.
Starting off with concept art, Wendell & Wild’s end credits take us through the film’s animation process. From sneak peeks of initial character designs, all the way to behind-the-scenes footage of building the film’s puppets (they’re huge). But the film’s post-credits scene is perhaps the true cherry on top of all that animation adoration. The short, but splendid, scene sees an animator at home waking up in the middle of night because of some ruckus. He gets up to explore his makeshift at-home studio, only to find our favorite Kat snooping around our very own Land of the Living.
Her little peek-a-boo is the cutest thing ever and will be sure to delight the film’s younger audiences, but is also a touching tribute to the relentless work of their animation team. It’s an ode to how much time they spent working on the film while adapting to the pandemic’s at-home requirements — and the unique impact of stop-motion animation in breathing a type of life into characters that other mediums within the field simply can’t.
Stop-motion is a painstaking process, and filming a realistic stop-motion scene through an iPhone is even more tedious, and yet the dedicated creators behind Wendell & Wild still gave us this sweet stinger to inject even more realism into the lovable Kat. Who knows what hellish havoc she’ll get up to in our world.
