Nightmare Before Christmas director blames John Lasseter for killing The Shadow King

Every time Henry Selick makes a movie, it feels like a comeback. Stop-motion animation takes time, and the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach knows that better than most. There were eight years between the box office bomb and cult favorite Monkeybone and his much more commercially successful Coraline. Now, it’s been more than a decade between Coraline and his latest, Wendell & Wild. During that time, Selick wasn’t idle. He was watching his movie die at the hands of disgraced Pixar head John Lasseter.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s ‌Behind the Screen podcast, Selick explained how Lasseter and the Pixar system killed his Coraline follow-up, The Shadow King. Selick told Behind The Screen that while he was finishing Coraline at Skywalker Sound, he met with Lasseter, who “really loved the movie.”

“They screened Coraline at Pixar and everyone liked it, and they offered me a deal to make a stop-motion film,” Selick said. “It had to be for a much lower budget than the CG films. Stop-motion films have never out of the gate been as successful as big CG films. The best stop-motion films live forever, though. And, as we see with Nightmare, make billions in merchandising.”

So Selick started making The Shadow King at Pixar but found the process of making movies with the studio difficult. Pixar is famous for killing projects and starting over. The most famous example is how the company scrapped a nearly complete Toy Story 2 in favor of a new direction. Lasseter and the team there turned out one of the best films ever made in less than nine months, but stop-motion is a little different. “It’s just how all their greatest successes [have been made]. [They] have their brain trust, and they rip things apart, they rebuild, rip things apart, rebuild,” said Selick. “He really couldn’t support my vision. He thought he could make it better. And so we kept changing and changing and changing.”

One can imagine how hard it must be to rip up and start over a figurine that’s moving one frame at a time. There’s no command-Z for that. But thankfully, Key & Peele had just premiered.

“Basically, John Lasseter couldn’t help himself. He tried to Disney-fy it until the budget went through the roof. It got shut down, and I was kind of down, I wasn’t sure I was going to make another movie again. But then the Key & Peele show started on Comedy Central, and it was Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele who kind of inspired me to do another film. I loved what they did so much.” Thanks for the inspiration, Key and Peele. Animation fans everywhere owe you a big one.

Wendell & Wild debuts on Netflix on October 21.