Henry Selick Picks Up Graveyard Book
Coraline man enters the dark realm
Fans of Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas rejoice: Disney has picked up the rights to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and handed over the directorial reins to stop-motion genius Henry Selick.
Selick, the man whose painstaking work has breathed magical life back into the medium, isn't the first to cast a covetous eye at Gaiman's phantasmagoric fairytale. Neil Jordan was linked to the material a few years back, before being sidetracked by all those Ondine selkies.
As per that classic Hollywood maxim - "You snooze, you lose" - Disney swooped for the rights and installed Selick behind the tiny stop-motion camera. The story sees a young boy called Nobody Owens raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his parents are murdered. Think The Jungle Book with a hint of The Frighteners, and all the amazingness that they could entail.
With Disney still to commission a screenwriter, don't expect to see Nobody anytime soon. They could surely do worse than hand the job to Selick, who, as writer of Coraline, has previous when it comes to bringing Gaiman's work to the screen.
Mind you, there's the small matter of the director's current, untitled project to keep him busy, a movie so secret it's probably working for S.H.I.E.L.D. Watch this space for more on that as we get it.
