Henry Selick returns with the show-stopping teaser for Wendell & Wild

It’s been thirteen years since Henry Selick’s last project, Coraline, and now the visionary filmmaker has returned with a new stop-motion animated film, titled Wendell & Wild. Time has only made The Nightmare Before Christmas director’s skills finer, as the first teaser presents a spellbinding, demon-laden tale fit with jaw-dropping animation sequences.

Lyric Ross leads the film as Kat Elliot, a troubled teenage orphan who embarks on a journey to snuff out her personal demons, named Wendell & Wild (voiced by duo Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key). Angela Bassett voices Sister Helley, who helps guide Kat through this harrowing odyssey with the help of her fellow badass nuns. Selick penned the script with Peele, who also serves as an executive producer on Wendell & Wild.

Selick employs the use of 2D cutouts as well as 3D puppets, taking inspiration from fellow stop-motion projects such as Charlie Kaufmann’s Anomalisa and Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs.

“We start with hand-sculpted stuff, and I work with 2D animators to figure out the expressions,” Selick explains to IndieWire. “I don’t like that being done in the computer.”

“I love origami, paper sculpture—this interplay between flat stuff and dimensional stuff,” he adds. “It’s a lot easier ’cause it’s flat and gravity is not the enemy as it is with puppets.”

With enough advanced technology to really smooth out work made using stop-motion, for this project Selick really wanted to lean into the look and feel of the traditional medium. The result is dynamic, gritty, and all-around spooky (just in time for Halloween).

“I wanted the stop-motion to be more obviously stop-motion,” he says. “There’s more flaws in it. We shot more on 2s, even 3s. Laika does the prettiest stop-motion in the world, but sometimes I feel like it’s CG and I wanted to make our film look a little rougher. And I love what Wes has done—his last [animated] film, Isle of Dogs, is a masterpiece—but that’s his particular style. I was building on what I’d done in the past but maybe going back a little, not fussing so much. There were less rehearsals, I wanted to capture a little more of the spirit and efforts of people and not go through so many steps.”

Wendell & Wild arrives exclusively on Netflix on October 28 following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.