Hilda Review

Being in isolation is hard, and with no recreation activity to do presents a lot of time to kill, so turning to streaming services and binging shows when the time is available to kill time has been a popular choice. 

Hilda is an animated cartoon featured on Netflix which follows a young girl named Hilda on her adventures going through the wilderness and the bustling city called Trolberg. This show has a cute and charming style that caters well to the mystical and fantastical elements that tie itself into the story.

Vox summarized the effectiveness of the world succinctly, “The show’s irresistible world is immediately eye-catching, but Hilda has more going on than its wistful aesthetic. It is, deep down, a show about processing some fairly complex emotional experiences.” 

From episode one, we are introduced and thrown into the fantastical elements of the world that Hilda lives in with her pet deerfox, Twig, and her mother who all live together in a cozy cabin in the woods. 

Season one is like any other season one for an animated series. The basic gist is introduced in the first few episodes; the concepts introduced in those early episodes come into play back in the later episodes of the same season, and then introduces new elements that can be content for the next season if greenlit. 

Season one ends with a neat ending, expected both to tie up loose ends of the world Hilda lives in, but also leaves plenty of room for new content for any future seasons. This season in particular presents the world that Hilda lives in in a precise and easy way to understand worldbuilding with its storytelling. 

Senior, Kat White, said, “It’s just a very whimsical show that deals with darker themes…Overall it looks really good and my vibe. [It looks like a show] in the same vine as Gravity Falls was.”

Season two on the other hand drops off with a cliffhanger and is unkind in leaving any clues to what will happen in the next season.

Hilda presents dilemmas like any other run of the mill kid on an adventure show. However by the end of the season, you can clearly notice a difference with her mother, Johanna. Unlike other shows, the parents are always happy to have their kid home at the end of the day and they take any explanation of their adventures at face value or dismiss any outlandish story their kid comes up with. 

Not with Johanna though. 

SPOILERS AHEAD

Because of their circumstances at the end of the second episode of season one, they have to move to the city, Trolberg, and away from Hilda’s childhood home after being destroyed. This makes it so that Hilda has to leave the city and the woods she loves so much behind.

However this does not stop Hilda going out for adventures and overtime the stakes get higher and higher, and because of that, it takes more and more time to solve those dilemmas. Johanna notices this, and this causes a tension to form between the mother and daughter duo. 

This tension on both of them feel real and it is written in a realistic way as it shows without taking away or downplaying the seriousness that Johanna is worried about while also playing up the importance Hilda’s job is in helping others. 

Johanna’s a mother, she’s worried and Hilda does not tell her about her adventures all that often. This gets explored even more with season two which ramps the stakes up to a significant degree to the point where Hilda is grounded from going out for an entire day, not to mention the on screen spats they have over what they both individually want. 

SPOILERS END

At the end of the day, Hilda is a kids show, but Hilda is a kid’s show with a lot of depth. Exploring the themes of self responsibility and showing the perspective of a worrying mother can be a lot to juggle in a 20 minute episode and they’ve done that quite successfully. 

“Hilda is many things: weird and irreverent; silly and quirky; but more than that, at its very core, lies a show that genuinely feels.” Drew Koenig wrote about Hilda on the rotten tomatoes website.

Hilda is 4/5 

It is a gorgeous show and fantastical without going too far into high fantasy that’s easy to compare to the quiet magic of ghibli movies and is such a simple show on the surface.