Wendell & Wild: Why Henry Selick took 13 years after Coraline to make a movie

Henry Selick is an exceptional filmmaker. He’s built a fervent multi-generational fandom around his stop-motion classic Christmas Nightmare, and a more cultish fandom around his live-action/animation hybrids James and the Giant PeachAnd Monkeybone. But Selick hasn’t released a movie since the Neil Gaiman adaptation Coraline2009 He died in 2009.

“Through hell and back,” Selick sighs. He’s talking specifically about the production process on his new movie, Wendell & WildThe movie is scheduled to be released on Netflix in the coming weeks. Oct. 28. Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key star as the title characters. The project has been in production for over five years. 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.”

Photo by Sergey Rakhmanov/Netflix

But “hell and back” doesn’t just describe the Wendell & WildProduction delays or the tedious, detail-obsessed work of creating a stop motion animated film. It could just as well describe Selick’s career in the years since Coraline. Selick, who had made that film together with Portland’s stop-motion studio Laika in Portland, moved to Pixar in 2010 to create a new studio to do more stop motion work. Selick was forced to cancel his first project by Disney. Shadow King, after two years, feeling that it wasn’t far enough along to make its planned 2013 release date. Since then, Selick reportedly devoted time to developing a live-action movie based on Adam Gidwitz’s novel A Tale Dark and Grimm The TV game adaptation Little NightmaresBefore he turned to Netflix for the latest movie.

For that matter, “hell and back” describes the plot of Wendell & WildThe film is about two demon brothers who have big dreams. A 13-year old orphan girl has more passionate but smaller dreams. For the demons Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele), the story starts in a particularly small and specific hell — a theme park called the Scream Fair, where damned souls (represented as vague, hollow-eyed, flailing ghosts) are tortured on macabre carnival rides. Kat, a rebellious orphan (Lyric Ros), is fresh from juvie hall and begins the story with her heartbreaking loss of her parents. Living in two different hells causes the trio to collide, and they hope to use one another to escape their respective miseries.

Walking through Selick’s studio for an early look at what went into Wendell & WildIt is amazing to see the world he operates on at such vastly different scales. In the film itself, Kat, the demon brothers, and the movie’s many other human and inhuman characters — including key players voiced by James Hong, Angela Bassett, and Natalie Martinez — dominate the screen like any characters, to the point where they feel human-sized. Their puppets are only 9-16 inches in height. The sets where they operate take up entire rooms, on the other hand, in order to make a 9-inch character feel like they’re standing in the wide-open space of a city or a graveyard on screen.

And sometimes a single detail dominates one of the studio’s storage spaces. For a single close-up shot of a candy apple in a nightmare scene, the movie’s team had to build a giant apple, considerably larger than a human head. Peter Sorg is the director of photography. “We had to bite the bullet and build this incredibly giant apple for probably 20 frames of film,” he says. “No idea how much that thing costs.” He also shows off a single giant demon hand, also for a close-up, that’s more than 6 feet tall.

Image by Netflix

The set, which includes the entire Scream Fair, takes up approximately the same space as a typical kitchen table. Wendell and Wild’s hell of origin is a meticulously detailed sadistic theme park, built on top of the rotund stomach of a 300-foot demon named Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). During a studio walkthrough, the animators enthuse about everything that went into building the Scream Fair — the working lights on the Ferris wheel (which dumps shrieking souls into a tank full of electric eels), the tiny roller-coaster cars that actually travel around a miniature track before reaching the dead ends where they violently crash into each other. Sorg says Selick’s goal in designing the Scream Fair was “kind of Hieronymus Bosch meets Disney World.”

He pointed out another identical copy of Ferris wheels nearby. This is scaled up for the 16-inch puppets. Whereas the Fair is designed for small 2-inch bodies, the entire Fair can be seen. There are many of them all over. Wendell & Wild set, that pattern is repeated — fantastically detailed full-size puppets duplicated in thumbnail-sized miniature for distance shots, or one small part of a bigger set blown up into an exact physical duplicate to match the full-scale puppets. “Yeah, it was fun, trying to work out how we could do all these different scales that are really specific to stop-motion,” Sorg says.

Selick’s designers built these sets in an immense warehouse, where 20-foot-tall black curtains divide the high-ceilinged space into separate rooms. Each space is occupied by an animator who spends months guiding intricate puppets through tiny movements, captured film to film. The goal is approximately two seconds per day. This animation looks so fluid and smooth that you could mistake it for CGI animation.

Don’t tell Selick that, though — he bristles at the implication. “I’ve been this way for a while, but [I think], why do stop-motion if it’s going to end up looking like CG?” he asks.

Certain Wendell & Wild looks far more caricatured and stylized than most post-Pixar animated kids’ films. CG animation is just starting to trend away from realism and toward more artistic stylization, but Selick’s work looks more angular and exaggerated. Selick specifically sought Pablo Lobato (Argentinian artist, well known for his geometric, sharp-edged portraits), to help design the characters. This gave them a very extreme and off-the-wall appearance.

And Selick made one decision on this movie that he wasn’t allowed to make on Coraline. On that movie, he says, he pioneered the use of snap-on 3D-printed faces for stop-motion puppets, a technique meant to let animators more rapidly and easily change a character’s expressions, and accurately change their mouth shape so they could lip-sync recorded dialogue. There’s a visible seam line where the separate tiny face meets the rest of the puppet’s head, and when Selick was making Coraline Laika wanted the seams to remain visible.

Photo by Ariel Spaugh/Netflix

“Even then, I wanted to do as much of the work in camera as possible. So there’s hardly any special effects added to [Coraline],” Selick says. “But Phil Knight, the guy who was funding the studio, the founder of Nike, he just freaked out over [the seam lines]. It just troubled him too much.” Eventually, Selick compromised and let Laika use CG to cover up the seams.

Wendell & WildSelick prefers a more complex facial-replacement method with distinct upper and lower facial sections. This was because it allows for different expressions. These seams were visible in the movie. “I think people will watch, and in five minutes, [those lines] disappear, because you get invested in the characters.”

Selick considers such small artifacts to be an essential part of work in stop motion. “There are mistakes there,” he says, with visible enthusiasm. “The audience has to work a little more to believe in what they’re seeing, but not so much that it It feels good like work. They are more likely to put in the work if they do. They should. Then the film becomes more to them, because we’re part of it. It’s not all lubricated imagery, perfectly done, that’s just like every other Hollywood CG film.

“So being more obviously handmade, with bumps and lumps — I think it’s a real plus. It will make us stand out. It’s something very different.”

Wendell & WildNetflix releases new series Oct. 28. We’ll have more behind-the-scenes details from our set tour closer to the film’s release date.