There’s something about stop-motion animation as a medium – perhaps the choppy, lurching quality of the movement – which seems to lend itself to stories featuring reanimated corpses. From Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton armies to Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride, and now director Henry Selick’s Wendell & Wild: all feature the dead, in various stages of decomposition, cavorting around the living world, shedding limbs and claymation eyeballs as they go.
In this case, the dead are raised thanks to the meddling of the pair of eponymous demons, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (the latter co-wrote the film), equipped with a tube of infernal hair tonic. The aesthetic owes something to the macabre DayGlo dark forces of the Oogie Boogie segment of Selick and Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas; the story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.
• On Netflix from 28 October
