Wendell & Wild actually skews much closer to ParaNorman, though, in style and substance. What’s the harm in that?Ĭonsidering Selick’s involvement and the protagonist being a teen girl, the easy comparison point to be made is Coraline. They just want to build the fair their father (Ving Rhames’ Buffalo Belzer) rejected in their own realm. She’ll ignore Sister Helley’s (Angela Bassett) warnings of bad omens when a demonic mark of teeth appears on her hand and willingly swear her allegiance to them because the chance that they’ll hold up their end of the bargain is simply too appealing. If that means accepting a supernatural deal on behalf of Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele), so be it. All she wants in this world is to reunite with Mom and Dad. (Though that’s also perhaps the point: such issues are sadly very transparent to today’s youth.) The Klaxes have always been a bane to this town, but they’re now on the cusp of finally wiping it from the map completely-and willing to do whatever is necessary to fulfill that goal.Īnd while Kat is on some level taking up her parents’ fight against them (the Klaxes tried purchasing their brewery’s land), her greenlighting the raising of the dead is strictly personal. They work on that level, though, so you can excuse just how overstuffed the script is with social issues despite never quite engaging with them. Themes like the jaded capitalist takeover of a wholesome family town and how profiteering off incarceration demands that jails be filled without a realistic chance for rehabilitation are heavy and relevant background information, but they never really come together beyond a superficial need to create villains out of the Klaxes. With the overall economy running through cutthroat private prison magnates the Klaxes (Maxine Peake and David Harewood), there’s little room for actual progress when crime is literally what pays them. The drive down shows how derelict this once vibrant place has become-so much so that Kat wonders if Father Bests (James Hong) only took her in for the money the state promises as compensation. Sprung as part of a youth-reformation project, she is now on her way back to her old hometown and its Rust Bank Catholic School for Girls. A few years removed from her parents’ death (a tragic car accident she survived), Kat has bounced around the system only to eventually land in juvenile detention.
X-Ray Spex, Death, and more blast through Kat’s (Lyric Ross) boombox.ĭespite the title, she is our protagonist.
(Peele cites “Prepared for Terries” as inspiration for their characterizations.) Plot points were reworked, the lead was shifted from an adult woman to a teen girl, and the whole became infused with an Afropunk soundtrack to provide young Black children a conduit to their own experiences through a lens specifically courting them. And there in the drawer sat Wendell & Wild.īorn as a short story with early sketches of the titular demons based on Selick’s sons (and ultimately credited as an unpublished book he wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman), the conceit’s hapless brothers searching for a way to enter the Land of the Living proved perfectly suited for the sort of manic rapport Key and Peele effortlessly brought to their sketches. While that inevitable meeting’s purpose was to enlist their vocal talents, Peele turned the tables to ask if he might also produce whatever Selick did next. The director would ultimately finish its five-season run and declare Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele the “boldest, bravest, and funniest” comedy duo of his lifetime, vowing to reach out and broach the subject of collaboration in the future. So while Selick took a creative step away in the aftermath, he found Key and Peele debuting on Comedy Central. It was supposed to be his follow-up to Coraline and buzz was strong before things went south. Case in point: Henry Selick’s The Shadow King being unceremoniously scrapped by Pixar.
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