When I was asked to do a set visit for Wendell and Wild, the new stop-motion animated film from Netflix, you couldn’t get me on the plane fast enough. I had never heard of the project, but the names attached were too intriguing. Director? Henry Selick, of Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline fame. Producer and star? Jordan Peele, formerly of Key & Peele comedy; currently of directing big-screen chills like Nope. The pair worked on the script together. With that talent, you can expect a funny, adorable, creepy tale of monsters that is both heartwarming – while taking a bite out of said heart.
Wendell and Wild stars Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key (the Key in Key & Peele) as demon brothers, Wendell and Wild, who seek the help of 13-year-old orphan Kat Elliot - fresh off a stay at juvie – to summon them to the Land of the Living.
As Henry Selick explained to a small group of eager journalists one April morning in a dark Portland studio, Wendell and Wild started as a short story he wrote and illustrated many years ago, based on his sons, when they were young (“Because they were somewhat demonic,” Selick joked).
Years later, Selick became a huge fan of Key and Peele after seeing their Comedy Central TV show. “I was just so impressed by their work. I said, what the hell, I’ll just reach out. They probably don’t know who I am, but I wanted to work with them. I’m not known for comedy in my films. There’s always comedic elements, but I really had this desire to work with them and bring what they do into a project that I love.”
When Henry Met Jordan
Key and Peele were interested in working with Selick, and Jordan actually wanted to have a face-to-face with Selick, and “do more” with Selick than just a skit on Key & Peele. Selick shared his pages of Wendell and Wild with Jordan, who got “very excited” and “basically said, ‘I want to be involved creatively.’” He was just starting up his new production company, Monkeypaw Productions, and asked to be a producer on the project. Selick recalls Jordan nervously asking that they go out and pitch Wendell and Wild quickly because Peele’s first feature film, Get Out, was due to be released in two weeks, and he was worried it would be a flop.
Selick and Peele worked together on the story, and Selick enlisted Pablo Lobato, an Argentinian artist, to design the characters. Despite the technology for stop-motion animation having jumped forward significantly since the days of say, Coraline, Selick promised us that Wendell and Wild will not look “as perfect as Coraline.” In Coraline, many of the pieces were 3D printed, as opposed to being hand-sculpted, but the seam lines, where the individual pieces were fit together, were digitally erased, giving it a cleaner look. The seam lines will be left in Wendell and Wild. “There are mistakes. The audience has to work a little more to believe in what they are seeing. Not so much that it feels like work, but I think they become more invested if they make the effort – and I want them to.” Selick sees the “bumps and lumps” as something that will make the characters “stand out.” “We rely mainly on old-fashioned technology and at the center of it all, it's humans performing through the puppets in a straight ahead performance. It's not like any other type of animation where you have key frames,” Selick said.
Welcome to the Scream Fair
It’s difficult to put into words the magic of stop-motion animation. It has always been a format that I have been fascinated with. But part of the magic, the fascination, is actually getting to see the puppets and sets with your own eyes. Unfortunately, the best I can do is try to describe it. Or, in the case of the Scream Fair, let Henry Selick describe it:
“You see, Wendell and Wild are demons in the underworld who have crossed their leader, Buffalo Belzer, a giant who is 300 feet tall. He’s very vain, and their punishment is being sent to work on a hair farm: tasked to implant hair plugs on the balding Belzer. What did the demon brothers do to cross their leader? They dared suggest that the Scream Fair be turned into a Dream Fair.
“The underworld, in our film, it's not the hell; it's called the Scream Fair, and it's where the souls of the danged to go - not the damned, but the danged - you know, the crooked lawyers, the meter maids, the bad people, but not the truly bad,” Selick explains. Their punishment is to live in an amusement park that is a cross between Disneyland and Hieronymus Bosch. “Rickety rides that fall off the tracks and collide and the souls get dumped into a tank with electric eels. They get electrocuted over and over. Something familiar from some of the Disney parks, the Tea Cup Ride, but in our affair, a giant teakettle pours boiling hot tea on you.”
The Scream Fair was certainly the most impressive set we saw on our set visit. Built on Belzer’s belly, the Fair is strung up with lights and had little conveyor belts that really moved the rides. Motion control rigs were built to move the rides the appropriate amounts for each shot. The set, which was roughly 10 feet in diameter, had a 3D model made which could be split into four pieces in case they needed to shoot on the inside and couldn’t easily reach it otherwise. They didn’t need it.
Since we were there in the final days of shooting (thanks, COVID!) there was only one other set that was still in place for us to take a peek at: a cemetery. We didn’t get a lot of context about what we were looking at, other than it represented the “old guard” that were accidentally revived by Wendell and Wild. Anthony, one of the animators, told us that this was one of the most complex scenes in the film. Malcolm, another animator, told us that this scene was “shot like a music video,” shooting “25 things at once.” Matt, the art director for this scene, wanted to give it a Universal horror feel, and a “funhouse” vibe, as well as use floating elements to create depth.
Wendell and Wild and Kat - Oh My!
We did get to tour a selection of the 360 puppets created for this film. Fifty-one artists were in the fabrication department, and created 120 face shapes for each character. The artists tried to make each character resemble the actor who played them in some way, which is why Wendell (Key) is taller and Wild (Peele) is shorter. In the “real world,” in our world, the demons transform themselves into what Selick describes as “elegant, dapper morticians… they’re not bad. They’re not even that scary. They can be a little bit scary, but, you know, it’s Key & Peele! And I think what they have done with these roles is just incredible. It’s wonderful. Very inspiring to the animators, and to the storytelling.
“On the other side of this [story] is Kat, who is just getting out of the juvie justice system,” Selick continues. “She’s been given a second chance at this ritzy school, RBC Rust Bank Catholic School for Girls.” Along with her new school, Kat is given a bag of stuff that belonged to her dad. “He was a first generation Black punk fan, and that’s her bond to him,” Selick explains. “She’s an Afro punk girl. She transforms herself… puts on these huge monster boots and struts the hallways there. She has her dad’s old boombox. It's called the Cyclops. It was like a seventies thing with a single giant speaker.
“Ultimately, she's the conduit. She's the one who, for a reason I won't explain now, actually has the ability to summon demons. These guys come to her in a dream and make a deal with her: she'll summon them to the Land of the Living, and they'll bring back the one thing she wants in the world, her dead parents. At the time, they make that promise. They actually don't have the ability to do that. But they're very good at lying.”
The characters of Wendell and Wild were very loosely designed around Key and Peele. Were they animated around their movements as well? The short answer, Selick tells us, is no. “They weren’t traveling around doing full-blown performances; it was mainly hand gestures and things. It's more about the rhythms of their speaking, how much they do voices. There's hours and hours. We should just put up the outtakes because they were brilliant, they were riffing on so many things, we just couldn't stop recording. It's just so magical. We have some improv here and there, but no complete riffs. More like a better way to say something or adding something that was in the script. It just suddenly makes it all funnier.”
Inevitably, the question of a sequel comes up. Selick assures us that the intention was for Wendell and Wild to be a “one and done”-type movie, so they haven’t thought up any ideas for a sequel. “If it gets a great reception, I guarantee there will be calls for a sequel!” he jokes. “That's how it always is, of course. Nobody really wants to make the sequel until they know that what they've got is successful. If there’s a good story, it might be worth doing. [Stop motion] is so hard to make, let’s make sure the stories are excellent!”
Wendell and Wild premieres on Netflix on October 28