There’s a reason the previous slide had to specify “Newt” as the only computer-animated film canceled by Pixar. Hot off the success of “Coraline,” Henry Selick was hired by Pixar to set up his own stop-motion studio, Cinderbiter, within the company. Its first project was to be “The Shadow King,” about a boy whose deformed hands make amazing shadow puppets.
The issue was that Pixar’s typical style of reworking its CG movies midway through production led to an extremely ballooning budget when applied to stop-motion. John Lasseter’s producing style did not mesh with Selick’s directing style. Selick told Entertainment Weekly, “If he just left us alone, they would’ve had a really good movie for the budget.”
Selick has since regained the rights to “The Shadow King,” so of the various films on this list, “The Shadow King” is theoretically best positioned to pull a “Nimona” and get completed if some studio is willing to take a chance on it. Another extremely promising, yet canceled, Cinderbiter project, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book,” might still be attempted at Disney in live-action; Marc Forster was attached to direct as of 2022.
