Season Review: WondLa Season One

Apple TV+ continues to add to its animation catalog with the release of WondLa, an adaptation of the Young Adult novels of the same name. The series follows the travels of Eva, a girl who was raised in a futuristic underground shelter in the far future, taught by a protective artificial intelligence designated as “Muthr”, but becomes more curious about the outside world as she grows. She soon gets a big look at the outside when her shelter is attacked, forcing her and Muthr to flee into a world that has become very harsh for humans, as numerous alien races have taken over in humanity’s absence. Eva must use the skills she has learned since birth, as well as her inherent ingenuity and curiosity, in order to survive in the ravaged landscape, make friends with numerous beings who fear her and her kind, and find a way to get to the mysterious and enigmatic WondLa, a land that may give her clues to where the rest of the human race may still live, including the seemingly deceased Cadmus Pryde. And along that winding and twisted path, she may just end up learning something about herself as well.

WondLa is another project from the still fledgling Skydance Animation, who despite having been founded in 2017, has only had a scant solo productions, including leprechaun-based comedy Luck. So far, their animation-style can best be described as Pixar-lite, which would make sense as their Head of Animation is John Lasseter, former Chief Creative Officer at Disney and Pixar before being essentially pushed out when a long alleged history of sexual misconduct within the company was made known. What’s relevant about any of that here is that WondLa very clearly shares some visual DNA with Pixar works, though whether through lack of finances or lack of creativity, much of the animation can feel stiff and lifeless at times, while the character designs feel pretty much within the more obvious things you would think of when the ideas for “motherly robot”, “alien princess”, or “talking tardigrade” come to mind. None of them are BAD designs necessarily, but when the most obvious point of comparison here is what Pixar has put out of the years, you can definitely see things here feeling a need to stay within a creative box that holds it back a bit.

The story and characters also feel a bit restrained, not helped by the fact that this first season is only seven episodes long, which doesn’t give it much room to do much more than hit the basic and expected plot beats. Eva, as mentioned, enters a new world that is unlike anything she was trained for, including the fact that the multiple newly dominant species have a great fear of humans after what they apparently did to the planet before they were either wiped out or died out. And while it pushes a nice enough recurring theme of overcoming ignorance and fear to make connections and community, I don’t really feel like it does much, or maybe even was given the chance to do much, to portray that in anything more than the most obvious versions of that. That said, there’s still apparently two more books they can adapt to make for a tight three season show, which is apparently becoming the norm these days. And maybe this will give Skydance Animation more of a chance to branch out, along with their upcoming releases, which includes even a story by Brad Bird, another Pixar alumni known for Incredibles and Ratatouille. The sky’s the limit for Skydance, it’s just that WondLa might just be better of staying on the ground.