While we wait for Coraline to return to theaters with a brand new 3D remaster this August, director Henry Selick’s (Nightmare Before Christmas) next project has been revealed.
Variety reports this week that Henry Selick is planning on making a stop motion animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane his next movie.
Selick describes the project as “almost a sequel” to Coraline, serving as something of a companion piece to the beloved Gaiman/Selick stop motion collaboration from 2009.
“Instead of a child going to this other world with a monstrous mother, it’s a monstrous mother who comes into our world to wreak havoc on a kid’s life,” Selick tells the outlet.
The website details the status of the project, “With a honed 35-page treatment and scores of artwork and concept designs, Selick is now shopping the project around, hinting at interest from Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio studio ShadowMachine.”
Neil Gaiman’s novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane was published in 2013, and the book itself had also been described at the time as being “similar thematically” to Coraline.
In the novel, “A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.
“He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.”
