Henry Selick claims the former chief creative officer of Pixar John Lasseter is responsible for the cancelation of his planned stop-motion animation film The Shadow King.
Selick made this revelation during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
According to Selick, Pixar screened his first stop-motion film, Coraline, which led to an offer to work on a stop-motion film.
Pixar announced they had hired Selick to develop The Shadow King in 2009 for the studio's first fantasy stop-motion film. The film was about a boy who could craft shadows to fight monsters with his very long fingers. Unfortunately, Lasseter and the team at Pixar wouldn't stop interfering with the project until the budget bloated up and they had to cancel it.
In Selick's words:
They [Pixar] rip things apart, they rebuild, rip things apart, rebuild. [Lasseter] really couldn't support my vision. He thought he could make it better. And so we kept changing and changing and changing. Basically, John Lasseter couldn't help himself. He tried to Disney-fy it until the budget went through the roof. It got shut down, and I was kind of down, I wasn't sure I was going to make another movie again. But then the 'Key & Peele' show started on Comedy Central, and it was Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele who kind of inspired me to do another film.