Tim Burton’s advice to the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas: stay weird

Henry Selick’s oddball career began with a massive, enduring hit credited largely to writer-producer Tim Burton. Selick directed the stop-motion musical in 1993 The nightmare before Christmas, but Burton was already a box-office hit at the time, and his name is above the title on the poster, so people often assume he also directed it. Burton and Selick met while working for Disney and later worked together again on Selick’s next film, the 1996 Roald Dahl adaptation James and the Giant Peach. But Selick didn’t really make a name for himself until he made his first stop-motion film without Burton’s involvement: the 2009 Neil Gaiman adaptation coral.

Nevertheless, working with Burton has had a significant impact on Selick’s career. Selick’s new Netflix animated film Wendel & Wild, about two scheming brother demons (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele) and the angry 13-year-old girl who summons them to earth, is set in a bizarre world where the “souls of the damned” are being tortured in an underworld fun park, built on the chubby belly of a giant purple demon voiced by Ving Rhames. Wendell and Wild live in a prison in the demon’s nostrils, and when they’re not on punitive duty, they plant new hair on his head. Where do such images come from for Selick? He points to Burton’s influence.

“It’s something Tim Burton taught me a long time ago, and it applies,” Selick previously told Polygon Wendel & Wild‘s publication. “He said, ‘The biggest hits are movies that look normal, with a normal story.’ But who cares? Certainly not him or me. “Or you could have a movie that looks really weird and has a really weird story and that’s going to have the least amount of success and involve very few people. But you can have a movie where one of those two elements is normal and the other is weird, and you can have a pretty big cult movie.’”

Photo: Touchstone Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

The “normal” part of Wendel & Wild is the human element, or at least aspects of it. Orphaned as a young girl in a car accident, Kat (Lyric Ross) has grown into an angry, frustrated teenager who blames herself for the death of her parents. As the film begins, she returns to the seedy town she grew up in – a former brewery town that two wealthy land developers are aggressively buying up so they can build a massive for-profit prison. All of this could be straight out of a perfect mainstream award-baiting drama or a real-life underdog story.

Selick’s version of the story happens to feature magical hair cream, a zombie councilman, an omnivorous horse-sized tardigrade, and evil teddy bears guiding naïve girls through demonic summoning rituals.

“When I got into animation, I just wanted to do funky abstract stories,” says Selick. “You could see that in my student films. But I really loved telling good clear stories, even if they have some wild elements, especially if you’re going to have weird visuals. So that’s the key to what I’m trying to do: push the line, have audience challenges, but not have an entire film that’s challenging.”

Similar to coral, nightmare before christmasor Selick’s primarily live-action feature monkey bone, Wendel & Wild is gothic and macabre without being spooky, and hugely imaginative in unpredictable ways. The film’s Carnival of Hell is a particularly playful and improbable image that, according to Selick, stems from “a process of exclusion, playing with many different ideas, and shifting elements around until something feels right.”

He said the way he writes is “like pouring a bunch of paint on the floor and pushing it together and pushing it around to start making pictures. […] I’m pretty good at having a vision. I have a good filter, like that comes in, that stays out. Creating one of those worlds is just a kind of sense of what goes with it and what doesn’t.”

With Wendel & Wild, one of the trickier elements was Kat, the human protagonist, a 13-year-old black punk music obsessive who is released from juvenile detention straight into a rehabilitation program at a Catholic school. In a cinematic setting that often focuses on the authenticity of storytelling and who gets the rights to write or direct Black stories, Kat was a gamble — but one, Selick said, came from the heart and from producer and collaborator Jordan Peele .

“It wouldn’t have been possible without Jordan because I wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough, at least as the world would see it,” Selick said. He explains that in an earlier iteration of the script, the film’s protagonist was a nun and teacher at Kat’s school, Sister Helley, who was voiced by Angela Bassett – but that the film’s point of view “was the most important thing [Peele] wanted to change.”

Image: Netflix

“He said [the story’s focus] should be cat. I was worried it would like a bit too much coral. He said, “Well, I think she should be a person of color.” He didn’t care what color – he said it could be Hispanic, black, Asian. I felt like Kat had to be African American because of who Jordan is and because of his wish she could be someone he wished he could have seen in a theater as a kid.”

Selick said he personally identifies with Kat: “Under that off-white exterior, I’m like an 11-year-old misfit. And I think that’s good for me [creating] some of the protagonists of my films. I have a real personal connection with them.”

But to give her an authentic sense of her age and experience, he spoke to his wife, a special needs advocate who works with “kids who are at risk of being jailed by school.” And he asked Lyric Ross, now 19, for input This is us Actor who voiced Kat.

“She brought what makes Kat real,” he said. “I had a strong idea of ​​what she’s going through, what’s ahead of her and what’s going to happen to her. But I asked Lyric beforehand: I said, ‘I need help.'”

Selick said she was 14 when he first started working with Ross. “It was like finding treasure because we auditioned a lot more Hollywood and Disney trained young actors and they were just too polished and nothing real,” he said. “I stand behind Kat for what Lyric has brought. The second voiceover session, she knew her character so well that she stopped me and said, ‘Kat wouldn’t say that.’ And I would say, “Well, what would she say?” And she would give me some choices. Really, I would say the vital truth about her was brought through by Lyric.”

Wendel & Wild has been a long time coming – 13 years have passed since Selick’s last completed film, coral. Five of these were spent on various aspects of production Wendel & Wild. The remaining years were devoted to projects that never saw the light of day, including a stop-motion adaptation of the Adam Gidwitz novel A Tale of Dark & ​​Grimmand a Disney project, The Shadow Kingwhich the studio has shelved after years of development.

Could Selick’s deal with Netflix let him revive those projects? He makes sure to commit. During a set visit in Portland in early 2022, he stated that he now owns the rights to it The Shadow Kingwhich he felt was “too weird” for Disney and that he would love to work on again one day.

“It’s a really cool story,” he said. “It’s a kid with extraordinarily strange hands that he has to hide under sleeves, but eventually learns to cast shadows that come to life with his hands. That’s something I’d like to revive.”

Image: Netflix

He has also pitched Netflix for an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel The ocean at the end of the alley. Previous publicity had linked him to a possible adaptation of Gaimans The Cemetery Book, but he said the project isn’t on the table for the future: “That’s still tied at Disney. They never cracked the code for it. I absolutely didn’t know how to do it.”

Whether any of these projects are possible at Netflix may depend on how Wendel & Wild Has arrived. Selick said that Netflix is ​​”taking bigger risks than any other studio right now,” particularly on stop-motion projects like Guillermo del Toro’s version of Pinocchio, and upcoming projects with Aardman Animations. “You know, I have to be patient and see what happens.”

That’s his best hope at the moment Wendel & Wild finds his fandom — the specific group of people Burton was alluding to, the people who love odd elements in their stories. “I can’t force people to like it,” Selick said on that set visit. “But some of the things I’ve been working on ended up being very successful and lasting a long time. This is what I want. I want projects that are timeless. I don’t want to be sure.”

Wendel & Wild debuts October 28 on Netflix.