It’s difficult to categorize Hilda and the Mountain King, in no small part because Hilda and the Mountain King throws itself into so many different categories. Produced and marketed as a feature film, director Andy Coyle and screenwriters Luke Pearson and Stephanie Simpson attempt to tell a story that stands on its own while also tying up loose threads from the entire series. “It’s a special event,” Coyle said in an interview with Animation Magazine. “I really wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like just a long episode of the TV show.”
Unlike The Simpsons Movie, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, or any of the Sailor Moon features, Hilda and the Mountain King does not tell a parallel narrative even those unfamiliar with the source material can enjoy. Nor is it like Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, which crams the narrative somewhere in the middle of the series. (Though, with a third season in production, it’ll turn out like that anyway.) Maybe it has most in common with End of Evangelion, building off the assumption you’ve seen everything that came before in order to launch forward and bring everything to a close.
Certainly, the story feels big enough for a feature. Hilda and the Mountain King picks up immediately after season two’s “The Stone Forest,” where following a wild underground adventure in the mountain caverns, Hilda and her mother, Johanna, finally come to understand something about one another. Both Hilda and the Mountain King and “The Stone Forest” were taken directly from Pearson’s comics. (It’ll be interesting to see how the third season develops, now that the production team has exhausted Pearson’s source material.) All seemed well and fine until one of the trolls performed some ancient magic and turned Hilda into one of those great stone creatures. She also replaced Hilda with a human version of her troll daughter, Baba. The troll mother did this, we learn, because the troll world is too dangerous for a “gentle soul” like Baba, especially with those deep rumblings coming from beneath Trolberg, beckoning trolls toward it. And this doesn’t even factor in the threat of populist Trolberg Safety Patrol leader Erik Ahlberg and his increasingly militarized team.
The animators use the film’s extra running time to let their story expand, stretch its wings. Hilda has been consistently one of the best-paced modern cartoons: I never notice how frenetic and frantic it is, how much it crams into each 20-minute episode, until I go back and break down the episodes for these write-ups. But here, with the additional space, Coyle and his team don’t need to rush through the set pieces. The film feels both loose and immediate. They can let the emotional moments play out longer, hit harder. They can devote a couple sequences to Hilda running around, enjoying all the perks of being a troll, beats that might be brushed over or cut altogether from a series episode. They can do all this while navigating multiple plot threads involving a fallen despot, Johanna’s desperate search for her daughter, a revolutionary movement, and a secret that lies deep under the city. Frida and David get a storyline, though Frida’s doesn’t amount to much while David’s feels like it should have been explored more throughout the season. At least, they provide a perspective about what’s happening in the city while Hilda and Johanna run around the surrounding mountains, they show us the consequences of Ahlberg’s rhetoric and the schism between the people happy to dwell within it and those who want to challenge it. Still, too many of the other characters are relegated to cameos – Alfur, Kaisa the Librarian, Tontu, the Rat King, and Twig, still the best character.
The thing is, though, Hilda achieved the same poise, energy, and spirit it does in Hilda and the Mountain King as in the other season closers, “The Black Hound” and “The Stone Forest”. Those even did more work in terms of character development, and both were half the length of the movie. The series has always been able to hit those emotional and devastating beats regardless of how wild or unhinged an episode’s plot may get. The series has always left us with a sense of closure, of a story well told. …Apart from the season two cliffhanger. With Hilda and the Mountain King, I didn’t feel like I experienced a movie. “Our whole team loved tackling it in a fresh and distinct way from how we make the series,” Coyle said. The aspect ratio may have expanded to Cinemascope, there may have been some shots that were more ambitious and elaborate than usual, and it may feature a James Bond-esque opening title sequence from Giant Ant rather than Grimes’s theme song, but Hilda and the Mountain King still plays out like a long episode from the series.
Continued belowFor one, it relies heavily on previous knowledge of the series. There’s a moment Frida remembers something she learned with the kraken a few episodes back. There are moments designed for you to Leonardo DiCaprio point and go, I know that reference! The characters start and end in the same place because the second season already did the work to shape them, change them, and force them to look at the world in a new way. The characters’ motivations wouldn’t work without that previous knowledge. Erik Ahlberg undergoes the closest thing to a journey but, and this was an issue I had with the comic too, his eventual resolution feels too tidy and convenient. Hilda and the Mountain King never begins, either. The story picks up where we left off, not just an in media res moment, but like the whole first act got lopped off. Lopped off like David’s head. Moments that do suggest development and growth, like anything involving David sticking up to his mother or protesting the Trolberg Safety Patrol, repeat beats from the series, which would be fine if the creators didn’t rely on us to already know what these characters went through.
I wonder what a series ought to do when it’s granted a movie. If it has to welcome in new viewers or has to continue its ongoing narrative. Part of the decision to continue an ongoing story undoubtedly has to do with Hilda and the Mountain King’s distribution. If it had received a theatrical release rather than an extra card on Netflix, I’m sure we would have seen something radically different. Maybe characters would have come to a place of understanding and empathy, rather than running through its set pieces. Maybe the project would have relied more heavily on in-jokes. Maybe the piece would have had a beginning. I can’t help but think there has to be more to the experience of a movie than expanding the aspect ratio. To be honest, I’m not even sure if the expanded aspect ratio works to the movie’s benefit. Sure, we’re treated
to some wide vistas, but the expanded screen size undersells the towering presence of some of the trolls.
That’s not to take away from Hilda and the Mountain King’s accomplishments. I know it seems like I’m down on the whole thing, but I think Hilda and the Mountain King is a beautiful, assured, and intelligent work, told with confidence. I don’t think it works as a movie, but, as a part of Hilda, the Mercury Filmworks animated series, it’s a high point.
Per usual, the animation is gorgeous. Fluid and emotive, malleable and timed with precision. Watch how they animate Hilda when she becomes a troll, how they handle her play, letting her marvel at her new weight and dexterity. The production team approached the show with a blend of hand drawn animation and 3D modeling; by the time they’ve reached the special, it’s seamless. The character designs, particularly with the trolls, are clever and creative, each troll has its own distinct personality. And it’s impressive when the camera sweeps over the mountainside and they fill out the frame. Maybe the whole special was worth it for shots like that. I’ve always loved how Hilda creates background gradients, those stacks of solid colors, and they’re on full display here.
The vocal performances are high-tier, grade A quality. Bella Ramsey delivers every line with an excitement for the new and a desire to get back home. Daisy Haggard brings a real grief and heartbreak to Johanna. There’s a scene where she decides she has no other choice but to trust Ahlberg. In it, Haggard conveys the frustration, disappointment, and desperation at her ever-worsening circumstances with such sincerity you sincerely believe she has no other choice. Amerah Falzon-Ojo and Oliver Nelson also round out Frida and David, respectively, even as the special struggles to find something for them to do.
Most of all, Hilda and the Mountain King handles its thematic material with sensitivity. Hilda has always dealt with understanding the other and exploring how the system oppresses them to build itself up in their detriment. The special features student protestors, a military-grade law enforcement operation, and a populist leader lying to everyone around him in order to cling to his sad semblance of power. “They need something to look towards, not practical solutions,” Ahlberg says. The Mountain King himself serves as a towering parallel to Ahlberg, using similar rhetoric in order to amass people prepared to serve his agenda. But mothers, especially, play a large role in the story. Much of the major conflict stems from mothers trying to do their best for their children, whether it’s a troll mom body swapping her baby with a human to keep her safe, or a human mom who puts herself in dangerous, compromising situations for her daughter, or another mom who thinks she’s acting for the right reasons, even if they are based out of fear. The special balances all this without being too obvious or distracting. Coyle, Pearson, and Simpson never stop the story to say what they want us to take away from this, but allow it to unfold, to lead you through its ideas.
Like the series altogether, Hilda and the Mountain King is a spectacle of imagination and emotion. The animators and creators pushed themselves to create something special and the results are right on the screen. The final result may not sustain itself as a film – it may not be something a viewer with only a passing awareness of the series would be able to understand, and to say it has a beginning would be a tenuous statement at best – but it still holds water as an entry in this series’s mythology. What Hilda and the Mountain King does pull off lingers.
