SUPERSTITIOUS PEOPLE may call the production of Wendell & Wild cursed. For the feature follow-up to Henry Selick’s 2009 stopmotion masterpiece Coraline, the pandemic — which halted the film’s hand-operated animation — was just one of its problems. There was a forest fire that got so close to the film’s studio in Portland that the crew had to evacuate all the puppets. “We had to wrap them in blankets, throw them in vehicles and drive away,” Selick tell Empire. Then there was the cold snap: “It plunged so cold, the faces on the puppets started to crack.”
Yet Wendell & Wild defied the elements. who enlist a 13-year-old girl to help them escape the underworld — is a collaboration between Selick, Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, who both co-wrote and lent their voices to the film.