While his recent stop-motion projects like The Graveyard Book and The Shadow King have had trouble getting off the ground, Henry Selick is hoping to have better luck with directing a live-action adaptation of Adam Gidwitz’s joyously disturbing and violent post-modern fairy tale novel, A Tale Dark And Grimm, in which Hansel and Gretel escape the frying pan of their own bleak narrative and land in the fire of eight other, equally horrifying Brothers Grimm tales. They must then fight to survive, hopefully without the use of crossbows and hand-cannons.The quirky, gory, and Gorey-esque story seems like a no-brainer for the stop-motion filmmaker who previously willed Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton's playfully macabre visions onto movie screens one frame at a time in Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, respectively. And he's already worked with real-live, mostly human actors before in the intensely insane 2001 live-action/stop-motion hybrid comedy Monkeybone, though you could certainly be forgiven for forgetting that.
Join the discussion...