Stop-motion animation director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline) is looking to revive his scrapped project The Shadow King.
The film was initially set up at Disney, but after suffering budget issues and creative differences with the studio, the development of the movie was shut down. Selick has since acquired the rights to The Shadow King, and he making moves to develop it as a graphic novel.
Selick shared this bit of news at the Annecy Film Festival, and he is hoping that the graphic novel will spark interest and act as a proof-of-concept for an eventual film that Selick may offer to another director.
Selick previously talked about The Shadow King, saying: “I got the rights back from Disney and maybe if… [Wendell & Wild] is considered a success, maybe I’ll revive The Shadow King… It’d be different, it’d be like my original story, which they claimed they loved, but then changed everything in it.
He continued: “in my mind it was sort of like a darker in tone Dumbo. You know, Dumbo is made fun of for his big ears and turns out, ‘my god, that elephant can fly’, well this was a kid with deformed hands and maybe they’re not as cute as big ears and that was their problem, but that’s a really messed up thing.
“He’s gonna get taught by a living shadow girl how to use those hands to not only make the greatest hand shadows in the world, but hand shadows that can come to life. I thought that was a good story and still think it is.”
Selick actually screened five minutes of nearly finished footage he completed when producing the film. Variety says: “The first of two sequences featured a bald headed, white suited doppelganger for the Marvel villain Kingpin answer an urgent call while the shadow he casts takes on a malevolent life of its own.”
The second sequence “updated a clip circulating online with startling technical polish. Both ably imparted the director’s trademark sinister humor, lending the excerpt an additional bittersweet tinge.”
While it’s great to hear that Selick is looking to transform this into a graphic novel, I hope that Selick eventually gets to develop it as a feature film.
Source: Variety
Joey Paur
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