Sometimes in life, a goofball preacher tells a tiny group of mourners in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” we may feel “like a sheep trapped in a maze designed by wolves.” (The preacher is played by the film’s writer-director, Taika Waititi.) Watching this lovely little lark from New Zealand, you may feel like a happy camper on a twisty trail blazed by a cockeyed comic prodigy.  The center of attention, from the moment he arrives in a police car at a cabin in the boondocks, is a kid named Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison). With his gangsta scowl and incipient jowls, Ricky sees himself as a menace to society, and his dim-bulb social worker, Paula (Rachel House), could not agree more. In fact, he has a tender heart and a head stuffed with pop-culture rubbish, and he menaces only himself, having already flunked out of so many foster-care placements that his last chance lies with a scruffy backwoods couple who are more or less willing to take him in. (The wife, Rima Te Wiata’s Bella, covers him with unconditional love. Her husband, Hec, played by Sam Neill, can’t bear the sight of him.)  Ricky is a wonderfully fresh creation, the embodiment of hilarity—as well as the embodiment of embodiment, given his alarming girth—because he doesn’t see anything funny about anything, least of all himself. Mr. Waititi perpetrated some very funny stuff as a performer and filmmaker in his previous feature, “What We Do in the Shadows,” a vampire comedy that he co-wrote and co-directed with Jemaine Clement. Yet this new one operates in a far more accessible realm where whimsy and absurdity mingle freely with real feelings and droll social satire. (The closest analogy that comes to mind is the alternate universe of Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.”)  As an urban child of the digital age, besotted by video games, movies and TV, Ricky doesn’t make rigid distinctions between the reality of rural life and what he makes out to be a forest from “The Lord of the Rings” enhanced by smells and real dirt. That forest is where most of the movie plays out after a surprise plot turn—a genuine shocker—sends Ricky and Hec fleeing from their cabin, accompanied by Tupac, Ricky’s dog. For the kid it’s a great adventure, a chance to chase around with a real gun playing outlaw. For Hec it’s pure misery, at least at first, playing father to a kid he deplores. “Stick to the tracks,” he warns Ricky, who goes off to look for help at one point. “If you get desperate eat your dog.” For the cops, then the army and always the Javert-like social worker, Paula, it’s a nationwide manhunt for a presumed pervert who has abducted a child.  Mr. Neill is superb as a curmudgeon coming around to conditional love, grudging kindness and finally overt pleasure, even in such unlikely disputes as whether “majestical” is a real word. Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne—what a marvelous name—is a vision of sylvan beauty as Kahu, a Maori girl who makes her entrance on horseback. “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” which was based on a book by Barry Crump called “Wild Pork and Watercress,” has its share of misfired jokes and pseudo-mythic sequences that semi-fizzle. All in all, though, it’s majestical nonsense that is anything but nonsensical.  In Taika Waititi’s second feature as a director, the 11-year-old hero is played engagingly by James Rolleston. The time is 1984. The setting is a poor Maori community on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. It’s the town where Mr. Waititi grew up, and he plays Boy’s father, a goony stoner and scuzzy crook who has come home after years of absence to dig up a bag of money he’d buried in a nearby field.
After a kid obsessed with pop culture and a senior grouch flee their rural home, a large-scale manhunt ensues in this picaresque New Zealand film; directed by Taika Waititi, starring Julian Dennison, Rachel House, Rima Te Wiata, Sam Neill and Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne