It's been a wild ride for Henry Selick ever since he directed the classic, still brilliant 1993 stop-motion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Without going into too many details, he left that studio to help advance another one, leading to his directing the equally great Coraline in 2009. Not long afterwards, he was hired by Disney/Pixar for a stop-motion project which has remained mostly under wraps, although we'd heard the title might be Shademaker. He has his own studio called Cinderbiter, which is staffed by a number of high powered Pixar animators.
Selick revealed a few additional details to the LA Times, saying it was an "original story" he came up with, and that the somewhat dark tone will be familiar to fans of his work...
"It won’t come from totally left field," he said. "What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark -- not too dark -- fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that’s really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm."
There's a possibility it may be released later next year, but that's extremely tentative at this point. Ok, moving on to what I'm really excited about.
After finding so much critical success adapting Neil Gaiman's Coraline, Selick isn't straying far from the author's work. Deadline reports that Disney has secured the rights to Gaiman's award winning The Graveyard Book, with Selick in line to direct. If you've never read it, Gaiman got the inspiration from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book(also being adapted right now), only his story follows a young boy raised in a graveyard by ghosts and ghouls. Gaiman has long been my favorite author(can I get a serious Neverwhere adaptation, please??), and The Graveyard Book might be his most wondrous work to date.
Disney has apparently made this a priority, but since it won't go into production until Selick is free, don't expect it for a couple of years at least, which should give plenty of time for them to find a writer for it. The only question I have is whether or not Selick will make it a stop-motion effort? Neil Jordan was attached to direct a previous version as recently as 2010, and to the best of my knowledge it was going to be live-action. It's not as if he's unfamiliar with live-action films, as he directed the hybrids James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone. Stop-motion would seem to be the better fit.
