Selick was already in pre-production for another film which never made it to the screen, Pixar's The Shadow King, but it was announced that he would begin work on The Graveyard Book straight after. The plans they then announced in April 2012 for The Graveyard Book seemed like a match made in heaven.Īiming for an October 2013 release date, Disney hired Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and the film adaptation of Gaiman's novel Coraline, to direct a stop-motion version of The Graveyard Book. The project stalled and Disney, subsequently, picked up the screen rights for a hefty six figure sum. It also won the annual Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention, the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book selected by Locus magazine subscribers, and a decade later still featured highly in Time magazine's 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.Īll this acclaim, it was only a matter of time before someone adapted Gaiman's novel for the big screen, and that actually happened just four months after the book's publication when in January 2009 Miramax announced Neil Jordan (of The Crying Game fame) had signed on to write the screenplay and direct a film adaptation for them.

The Graveyard Book won Gaiman both the British Carnegie Medal and the American Newbery Medal recognising the year's best children's books, the first time both named the same work. Each of the eight chapters is a short story, each set two years apart as the protagonist grows up, with some chapters having analogues to Kipling's 1894 work for example, the chapter 'The Hounds of God' parallels the story 'Kaa's Hunting'. Still, when he eventually completed the novel there was certainly a Kipling-esque feel to it. Gaiman had set out to ' write something a lot like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard.' It took him 23 years to complete the book! Rudyard Kipling clearly not being so easy to emulate. Sounds just up Disney's street, doesn't it?Įr, no! Which is why in 2012, when Walt Disney Pictures acquired the screen rights and announced they were producing an adaptation it was quite a big deal.

The Graveyard Book, the 2008 young adult fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, traces the story of the boy Nobody 'Bod' Owens who is adopted and reared by the supernatural occupants of a graveyard after his family is brutally murdered.

The graveyard book disney