Hilda

Netflix (2019-2023) – Seasons 1-3 (Plus Movie)

Trailer available here

When Hilda first hit Netflix I remember sitting down and binge watching the entire season almost immediately. The artwork style immediately grabbed me and I was interested in the potential themes and direction it would go in too.

At that point I was completely unaware of its creator, Luke Pearson, and the sort of incredible content he could put together. So when the show carried on for a second season and got a movie I was ecstatic and I thought that the movie was going to be the end. After having left the UK since watching season one there was something also extra nostalgic and comforting about the show on a personal level with so many of the voice actors, like the creator, heralding from the UK it provided that wrap up in a blanket and escape from everything moment.

It turned out though that they had one more season in the works to try to wrap up some plots and provide a little more background into the reasoning of Hilda and her family. The thought of it made me nervous. To me the movie ended everything in the perfect place; It felt like we had seen Hilda grow and change, start to understand the world but keep that childlike excitement and desire to adventure and find value in both things and people around her. It highlighted themes of emotions, family, eternal changes outside of our control with a dash of social expectations thrown in there. But the potential for a third season to take that all even further was there.

It missed the mark though. Pretty hard. It felt a little forced and as though they were not truly doing it to enhance the background of Hilda and her family history but more because it worked into the Netflix ‘peak optimization’ of a third season. Finding some of the things out that we did about the characters was good and interesting but it also took away some of that magic of using your own imagination. Not only that but some of it felt very dragged out into entire episodes when it being mentioned of incorporated into other episodes of previous seasons would have worked just as well; Perhaps lengthening the season length to bring things into the existing content.

And yes, the show is called Hilda, it is supposed to be focused on the life of this blue haired girl (side note: why do main characters in animated things always have less traditional colored hair? Why do all the adventurous or wild life having people have to also appear to be so?) but given the premise of the third season was to talk about her parents and other family members it sometimes felt like they were forcing keeping Hilda as that main character instead of allowing deviation. If anything the way her friends, Frida and David, tagged along on the trip and how certain elements of their personalities just seemed so boldly different to previous seasons was the most confusing bit of it all.

In a weird way there being a third season hurts. Witnessing more of the art style was of course a delight. If there hadn’t been the previous two seasons and movie it would have been an absolute treat in its own right. It was in no way an actual bad season it just didn’t fit the trajectory or mesh well with everything that came before it and that is what makes it feel so disappointing. The magic, that little twinkle, the reality of the comfort of knowing these characters so well through what we had seen and our own imaginations made it all just feel blergh.

I would still recommend Hilda but now there does have to be that caveat of ‘prepare yourself’ if you go into season three. I suppose though that after going into a mountain and becoming troll for a while you, your mum and beloved dog Twig just aren’t going to be quite the same as you were before.