Hilda on Netflix is an excellent antidote to the spooky season
By Drew Koenig
Hilda on Netflix is an excellent source of comfort in this spooky and scary time of the year.
This is generally the time of year when we stock up on massive amounts of unhealthy candy and films designed to terrify you to your core. What after, though? Well, if scary movies are the shot, then you should consider Hilda to be the chaser.
Hilda, which recently dropped on Netflix, centers around the titular character (voiced by Bella Ramsey, AKA Lyanna Mormont from Game of Thrones) as a young girl who once lived in a magical forest with her mother until they are forced to move to the big city. Along the way, she makes friends with a tiny elf, an amnesiac bird, and two young children, Frida and David, who reluctantly adventure with her.
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Hilda is many things: weird and irreverent; silly and quirky; but more than that, at its very core, lies a show that genuinely feels. It exhumes a level of kindness that is becoming more-and-more common in modern animation but finds a way to make it its own.
Its most ready contemporary would be Steven Universe, another series that is always willing to offer the benefit of the doubt and a warm smile to any it deems deserving, which is everyone.
It portrays a world that, yes, on first glance could be considered scary. There are trolls and giant wolves, along with other things that could go bump in the night. But it always finds a way to subvert that notion of the “other,” the frightening thing you’re scared of that is only worthy of your fright.
Above anything else, Hilda believes in one surefire thing: What you think of something is often not what that something is.
It’s a show that manages to never have a true antagonist. Even when it does, it manages to find a different level, a little twist that makes them a bit more than the sum of their parts. The disaffected teenage girl that haunts dreams might be a jerk, but the series doesn’t shy away from showing a vulnerability.
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In the world of Hilda, nuances are everything and that’s part of why the show feels so special.
Hilda is now available on Netflix.