One For Them, One For Me: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and "Stuart Little"

A New Series by Christopher James

Take bets: Who did M. Night Shyamalan find it was easier to write for - a human child or a mouse child voiced by a 38-year-old man?

Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.
— Martin Scorsese: A Journey

Even from the get go, M. Night Shyamalan’s career was idiosyncratic. He went from Oscar nominated wunderkind to punchline all within the span of less than ten years. With his most recent movie, Old, Shyamalan seems to have figured out a way to own his poor reviews. At a time where the definition of “camp” is constantly argued, Old feels like pure, grade A camp. He’s also regained a lot of his box office cred with Split and Glass, which connected to one of his earliest films, Unbreakable. 

In 1999, Shyamalan earned tons of accolades, including Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations, for his smash hit, The Sixth Sense. At that point, Shyamalan had only directed two movies, a personal indie called Praying with Anger that he starred in and a movie called Wide Awake that stars Rosie O’Donnell as a baseball fanatic nun. Few things could’ve prepared people for The Sixth Sense’s level of success. However, it wasn’t the only financial hit of the year for Shyamalan. He had done uncredited rewrites on movies like She’s All That, so he wasn’t above doing “one for them” to earn some money. However, he was credited as the writer of the Visual Effects nominated children’s film Stuart Little.

Is there anything that connects The Sixth Sense and Stuart Little together, other than coming from the mind of the same writer? Let’s take a look (age old spoilers ahead)...

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1999 with Nick: "Stuart Little" and Visual (and Animated) Effects

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

This year, The Lion King joins Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) as only the third fully animated feature to be nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. I’ve read that tidbit in several places and assume that it must be true, according to people who know better than I do. I wasn’t sure why the movie that defeated Kubo, the 2016 remake of The Jungle Book, did not belong on this list, until I remembered that Mowgli was played by a living, breathing actor, Neel Sethi. Actually, what I mean is that I remembered Mowgli was in the movie, period. And I actually didn’t remember, I had to look it up. The Jungle Book, like an incredible number of films nominated for Best Visual Effects since the category got expanded to a five-wide field in 2010, made almost zero lasting impression on me. Like Best Original Song, it’s a division where I gladly release myself from seeing all the nominees. So, sorry, Lion King. Sorry, Endgame. Don’t get smug, Rise of Skywalker, you weren’t much better. And, until I proposed this series to Nathaniel, which partly exists to fill my own viewing gaps, sorry to Stuart Little, a movie that really tested my sense of the line between animation and visual effects, especially in the context of 1999. That line only gets blurrier as time goes on, so I thought I’d dig in a little...

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