Each film that Henry Selick makes feels like a comeback. The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach is more aware than most that stop-motion animation takes time. Between his cult hit and big office dud Monkeybone and his significantly more financially successful Coraline, eight years passed. Between Coraline and his most recent book, Wendell & Wild, more than ten years have passed. Selick wasn't sitting around during that period. He was witnessing the demise of his film at the hands of John Lasseter, the discredited head of Pixar.
Selick discussed how Lasseter and the Pixar system destroyed his Coraline sequel, The Shadow King, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen podcast. Lasseter "absolutely enjoyed the movie," according to Selick, whom he met while finishing Coraline at Skywalker Sound.
"They offered me a deal to do a stop-motion feature," Selick said. "They screened Coraline at Pixar and everyone enjoyed it." It needed to have a lot smaller budget than CG movies. Large-scale CG movies have always enjoyed greater initial success than stop-motion movies. But the best stop-motion movies endure forever. Additionally, as seen by Nightmare, make billions off merchandise.
Selick began work on The Shadow King at Pixar and encountered challenges with the studio's filmmaking method. Pixar is renowned for scrapping plans and starting fresh. The most well-known instance is when the studio abandoned a nearly finished version of Toy Story 2 in favour of a different approach. In less than nine months, Lasseter and the team there produced one of the best movies ever, but stop-motion is a little different. Simply said, that is how all of their biggest triumphs have been achieved. They "tear things apart, they reconstruct, rip things apart, they have their brain trust," Selick said. He was unable to assist my vision in any way. He believed he could improve it. We so continued to change over and over again.
It is difficult to comprehend how one would have to start over after tearing apart a figure that is moving one frame at a time. For it, there is no command-Z. Fortunately, Key & Peele had just made its debut.
In essence, John Lasseter was powerless to resist. The budget skyrocketed as a result of his attempts to make it more Disney-like. After it was shut down, I felt a little depressed and wasn't sure whether I would ever make another movie. But when the Key & Peele series debuted on Comedy Central, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele served as a type of inspiration for me to do a second movie. I adored what they accomplished. Key and Peele, thanks for the inspiration. You owe a lot to everyone who enjoys animation.
