Growing up can be a nightmare, and facing personal demons is the only way through it, the new Netflix stop-motion animated feature Wendell & Wild, from Jordan Peele and Henry Selick, posits. The devilishly whimsical movie subverts the ordinary and calls to mind Selick’s fan-favorite The Nightmare Before Christmas. Peele’s contribution to the spooky allegory is a deep understanding of Black childhood and trauma. The project was years in the making as Peele’s profile as a filmmaker grew with the success of films like Get Out and Us, and was born of the filmmakers’ mutual admiration for each other’s work.
“[Selick] reached out to me before Get Out—all because of Key & Peele. He had this vision of [Keegan-Michael Key] and me doing these characters that were essentially based on his sons: these mischievous demons,” Peele tells Vanity Fair.
Wendell & Wild begins above ground, where a green-Afro’d toddler named Kat Elliot (voiced by Lyric Ross) and her parents are at their brewery before heading home on a stormy night. Her parents buckle Kat up, and her father cues up a funky jam and gets to driving—eventually, (accidentally) off a rainy bridge and into a river. Kat’s mother manages to force her daughter out of the van when the car is submerged. When Kat surfaces, she’s an orphan.
“Within Kat Elliot’s focus level, there is very little to no fear of the obstacle that gets in her way,” Ross tells VF. Kat, when we meet her next in the story, is a punk-rock preteen with a pierced eyebrow, an outcast who keeps everyone at arm’s distance. After the death of her parents, she harbors a fear that anyone she gets close to will die. Peele, who cowrote and produced the movie, which is his Monkeypaw Productions shingle’s first animated feature, chatted with VF recently over Zoom about the film.
GET OUT, director and screenwriter Jordan Peele, on set, 2017. By Justin Lubin/Universal/Everett Collection.
Vanity Fair: What did you learn from the somewhat tedious world building of stop-motion filmmaking in Wendell & Wild?
Jordan Peele: The work that Henry and his animators do is actually very much the entire inspiration. You realize what it means to really master every single frame. So I wish I could take way more credit for the mastery of the craft that is Wendell & Wild. I was very constantly inspired by his [world-building]. It is about a mix of the meticulous and also having an understanding of how to embrace the mistakes that need to just happen as well.
As a cinephile, which Henry Selick film captivated you most?
I love all of his films. I think all of his films are masterpieces. Coraline was a real breakthrough in children’s horror. It really taught us that something like Wendell & Wild could be possible. Even at the time when it was made, it felt like it didn’t necessarily get the full appreciation that it has over these years. Neil Gaiman is a legend as well. [Working with Selick is] like when I got to work with Spike Lee for the BlacKkKlansman—[Wendell & Wild] was a situation where I was able to kind of meet a hero [Selick] and was lucky enough that they were interested enough in me and my work as well.
Did you have a moment where both of your geniuses kind of clicked and came together?
Selick reached out because of Key & Peele, he had this vision of Keegan and I doing these characters that were essentially based on his sons—these mischievous demons.
[I thought,] “Yo, this is the guy who made Nightmare Before Christmas.” I was in kind of low-grade, producing Hollywood hustle mode at the time because I didn’t have my thing together. The truth was I had to be able to give myself as much to this project as possible. I think he was feeling the same way and was very accepting of my validation of this crazy idea he was working on. We focused on this character, Kat, as somebody who would have been very life-altering for me if I was a 12-year-old and saw that character.
