Henry Selick says Jordan Peele urged him to have Wendell & Wild center a person of color
During a New York Comic Con panel, Wendell & Wild director Henry Selick reveals that Peele's input was essential to creating and casting protagonist Kat Elliot
It takes a visionary director to adapt Neil Gaiman’s Coraline in a successful manner, and Henry Selick is just that. But during a Saturday afternoon panel at New York Comic Con, the Wendell & Wild director says that choosing his protagonist for the project involved a key moment of collaborating with Jordan Peele, who he says pushed him to create a story that centers a young woman of color.
“Everything changed and evolved once we got in business together,” Selick shares. “[Peele] convinced me that the protagonist should be young Kat Elliot… he convinced me Kat needed to be a person of color.”
Selick, who calls Peele a “total freak” for stop-motion animation, says Peele urged him to make the choice based on Peele’s own experience with the genre as a child.
“Jordan said when he was a kid, it really upset him when he’d see animated films where there was no one onscreen who looks like him,” Selick shares. “That sort of unlocked a door.”
Wendell & Wild introduces Peele’s unique knack for horror to Selick’s whimsical, haunting animation. Peele and Selick first connected nearly a decade ago—Selick says that, disappointed with his series The Shadow King’s failure to launch, he found inspiration in Key & Peele. After three seasons, he decided it was time to reach out.
“With Key and Peele, it was always going to be that they were both going to be together,” Selick explains. “They required it, and that’s how the magic happened.”
Selick says he worked with caricature artist Pablo Lobato in order to create nuanced yet hilariously accurate animated versions of Key and Peele. In a new clip shared during the panel, Key and Peele’s characters were revealed in all their goofy, monstrous glory. Selick also shared clips of some of the film’s alarming animated horror, and a longer first introduction to Kat’s life at her new school.
Selick emphasized the breadth of Key and Peele’s improvisational powers, asserting that there are “two Grammy-winning comedy albums in just the outtakes” of the film.
Overall. for Selick, finding the perfect voices that can resonate with a wide berth of fans young and old was key to building Wendell & Wild.
“If you cast well,” he explains “you don’t have to direct too hard.”
Wendell & Wild will be available for streaming on Netflix on October 28.