Wendell & Wild Director Henry Selick Wants To Revive A Scrapped Neil Gaiman Adaptation
Despite the fact that Henry Selick had seemingly taken a break from making stop-motion animated films after 2009's "Coraline," "Wendell & Wild," his new collaboration with Jordan Peele ("Nope") shows that stop-motion animation (as well as Selick's love of it) isn't gone, but just mutating. Selick, who also directed "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach," used 2D on the new film, versus the traditional 3D approach, and was willing to experiment more when it came to creating the characters for the new film, using traditional cutouts as well as computer animation.
"Henry was pragmatic enough to accept the advantage of CG here," animation supervisor Malcolm Lamont told IndieWire. "A special team required to pull off all the individual cutouts was overwhelming. One person could go off and take five or six months and build everything in the computer." The results seem to have worked, with a current 89% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and glowing reviews, such as IndieWire, describing "Wendell & Wild" as "a giddy joy, hilariously gross, and earnestly heartfelt" (via IndieWire).
Obviously feeling some momentum with the positive reviews around "Wendell & Wild," Selick has renewed hopes of returning to a previously scrapped project: a stop-motion film version of another popular Neil Gaiman story.
He'd like to make The Ocean at the End of the Lane
While no one ever got to see Henry Selick's "The Shadow King," Selick is hopeful that, depending on the success of "Wendell & Wild," he can return to another project previously abandoned: a stop-motion treatment of Neil Gaiman's 2013 book, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane." "It's [Gaiman's] best book," he told EW. "It was set up as live-action, and then Neil gave me a chance with it, which would be amazing as a stop-motion film." Selick acknowledges that Gaiman had taken the project back but that after seeing him again, he asked if he could have another go at it.
"The Ocean at the End of Lane" focuses on a boy and the Hempstock family, whose various family members have also appeared in other Neil Gaiman stories: Daisy Hempstock appeared in "Stardust," and Liza Hempstock in "The Graveyard Book." Since the novel's release in 2013, there has been talk of turning it into a live-action film, but that hasn't come to fruition (via Deadline). "We just have to see if people watch ["Wendell & Wild"] to keep making another one," Selick told EW. "Wendell & Wild" can be seen in theaters beginning October 21 and on Netflix October 28.