Wendell & Wild took Henry Selick on a stop-motion journey from Development Hell to Actual Hell
Henry Selick is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. He’s built a fervent multi-generational fandom around his stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas, and a more cultish fandom around his live-action/animation hybrids James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone. But Selick hasn’t released a movie since the Neil Gaiman adaptationCoraline in 2009. Where has he been all those intervening years?
“Through hell and back,” Selick sighs. He’s talking specifically about the production process on his new movie, Wendell & Wild, scheduled for release on Netflix onOct. 28.The film, starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as the two title characters, has been in planning and process for more than five years now. It was delayed in production for more than a year and a half because of COVID, an unprecedented “heat dome” that took temperatures around Selick’s Portland studio up to 112 degrees, and a series of Oregon wildfires. At one point, he says, his creative team had to mount a “puppet rescue” to collect Wendell & Wild’s expensive, detail-driven stop-motion characters from the studio.
“All the puppets were put in cars and taken away when the smoke was getting close,” Selick says. “The idea was, Well, if the studio burns, we can rebuild the sets, but we can’t replace those puppets — they’re very labor-intensive.”
But “hell and back” doesn’t just describe the Wendell & Wild production delays, or even the slow, detail-obsessed process of making a stop-motion animated film in the first place. It could just as well describe Selick’s career in the years since Coraline. After making that film with Portland-based stop-motion studio Laika, Selick headed to Pixar in 2010, forming a new studio where he intended to produce more stop-motion
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