Henry Selick Interview, Coraline

Combining the visionary imaginations of two premier fantasists, director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and author Neil Gaiman (Sandman), Coraline is a wondrous and thrilling, fun and suspenseful adventure that honors and redefines two moviemaking traditions. It’s the first stop-motion animated feature to be conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3-D and it’s unlike anything moviegoers have ever experienced before. The film’s characters are voiced by Dakota Fanning,Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Robert Bailey Jr., Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, and Ian McShane. 

MoviesOnline sat down this week with Henry Selick to talk about Coraline which combines stop-motion animation with 3D. By the age of 20, Selick was studying painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and printmaking at Syracuse University while working at Little Silver Lumber and playing lead guitar for his band Shark River - an outfit that sounded like Frank Zappa meets The Grateful Dead. After seeing an experimental animated film, he realized that everything he'd ever been interested in could be combined in one medium.

To study animation, he attended CalArts in Valencia, California; his classmates there included Brad Bird, John Lasseter, John Musker, Tim Burton, Rick Heinrichs, and Joe Ranft. Soon he was a full-fledged animator at Disney, first working under Eric Larson - one of the original "Nine Old Men" - and later under the brilliant draughtsman Glen Keane, on The Fox and the Hound.

In 1990, his original series for MTV, Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, which combined a live-action central character with stop-motion and cut-out animation, won First Prize at the Ottawa Animation Festival and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival.

Selick’s groundbreaking musical, The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Tim Burton asked him to direct, was the first full-length stop-motion animated feature from a major studio, and was released in 1993 to rave reviews. An instant holiday classic and boxoffice hit, Nightmare was nominated for the Best Visual Effects Academy Award, and Mr. Selick received the Annie Award (the animation world's Oscars equivalent) for Creative Supervision. In 2006, Nightmare was remastered and re-released in digital 3-D, bringing the feature to a new generation of fans.

Selick’s next project, James and the Giant Peach, based on Roald Dahl's much-loved book, found him merging the worlds of stop-motion and CG (computer-generated) imagery with stylized live-action sequences. Released in 1996, the film won the top prize for an animated feature at the Annecy Film Festival. Monkeybone, his third feature, released in 2001, was loosely based on Kaja Blackley's graphic novel Dark Town and also combined live-action and animation.

In mid-2004, after completing animation for Wes Anderson's feature The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Selick joined LAIKA as supervising director for feature film development. While gearing up LAIKA's story and CG departments for feature production on Coraline, he helmed the 2005 CG short Moongirl. Henry Selick is an amazing artist and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about Coraline:

Q: What do you think an age appropriate audience might be for this film?

HENRY SELICK: Neil (Gaiman), with his book, always thought it was for 9 and up, but since the time of the publication until now, we think maybe 8, but it’s really the parents. It’s parental guidance, PG, and you might have a brave 6-year-old who would be okay. You might have a 9-year-old scaredy cat that you don’t want to get upset. It definitely gets edgy and it really builds up in the third act, but we’re not really doing something new. I mean, the technique and the visual style, but the sort of story telling and one of the reasons I loved the book so much, it’s classic fairytale, just in modern guise with wonderful new ideas and details.

Q: It could be a Grimm’s fairytale.

HENRY SELICK: Yup. The Button-eyed Mother.

Q: When you’re making a film of this nature, do you just tell the story in a way that seems organic to the film?

HENRY SELICK: I felt right from the start very much in tune with this story and that it is in fact a family film. I’ve had to deflect a lot of concerns or tried to reassure people along the way. Who I am and most of the things I’ve done in my professional life have always sort of treaded this line and I’m not a fan of hardcore horror. I can’t handle it. You know, Saw IV or …

Q: They call it Slasher Porn for a reason.

HENRY SELICK: So it’s not like, “Oh, if only I could really go there.” I myself am, beneath this tired middle-aged face, about a 12-year-old boy and I have faith in… I have two boys and they’ve grown up over the last few years. One is 17 and one is 10 and I’ve learned a lot from them and from my niece, Stephanie. I look to what I know to help me understand kids. Age appropriate, too edgy, I didn’t want things to get… I don’t like gore, I didn’t want to bring that into it, but I absolutely was going to keep that decapitated rat head in the movie no matter what. (laughs)

Q: This is an era when parents are up in arms over the fact that the dog is allowed to die in Marley & Me.

HENRY SELICK: They’re wimps!

Q: Is there a danger of becoming too protective?

HENRY SELICK: Well it’s such a false protection too. I mean, if kids would turn off their electronic devices and get outside like they used to, they’d get to understand real life and they would love it. You know, a kid comes across a dead squirrel or something, they poke it with a stick. They don’t run in fear. It’s the great mystery, it’s a great sadness, but this idea of oh, we’re going to protect them from that in movies, like why are movies this place where that’s where we’ll keep them in the cocoon when they’ve got the internet and someone’s big brother is playing Grand Theft Auto. I think it’s very unhealthy to falsely protect kids, and of course the dog has to die. Didn’t their parents see Old Yeller? It’s tragedy and sadness that makes it memorable. If Bambi’s mother didn’t die, would that still be remembered as a classic?

Q: I just read the other day that 30 years after Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, people are still complaining about the Child Catcher. He’s a scary character, but …

HENRY SELICK: I don’t know. Neil is better than I am at calmly arguing in favor of a little more creativity allowed towards children and dark with the light. It’s just who we are, it’s thousands of years in our history of being warned against going into the cave at night. You might get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger and whoever was the best at warning became the storytellers and people would come to hear those stories just to get scared. Those folks might have a problem with our movie. I suggest they keep away.

Q: Does it give you satisfaction to bring out a brilliant stop-motion animation movie at a time when so many people are saying CG is the only way?

HENRY SELICK: Yes indeed, it gives me satisfaction. I’ve tried all the types of animation and done a little live action as well and I just happen to feel stop-motion is the most timeless of the animations. It almost feels old fashioned no matter when it’s made and it doesn’t age. It feels like it’s alchemy from some time in the past. It has not always been easy to get people to fund a stop-motion feature when you look at the huge success, and deservedly so, of the Pixar films and some of the Dreamworks pictures, but if you look at the huge success of The Nightmare Before Christmas, it may not have been as big when it first came out, but it lives on and on and on and it fuels merchandise like nobody’s business. And it’s something that the kids who watched it, some of them are grown up now, and they’ll have kids and they’ll share it. I think there’s a special quality about stop-motion. There’s an energy. You can sort of feel the humanity in it, that it was shaped by hand. It almost vibrates with the energy of the artists who brought it to life. So, yes indeed, I’m happy to be bringing out a stop-motion feature.

Q: Were you there when Dakota Fanning toured the studio? Did she enjoy it?

HENRY SELICK: I was there for part of the tour and it was great to see her react to things. We have an amazing costume department but it’s all miniatures so it’s the best doll clothes in the world. There’s a hair department, but again, the wigs are only this big. She and her family and her sister came by and I think it was all incredibly fascinating because the house where Coraline lives, especially the other version which is magnificent, it’s the best doll house you’ve ever seen. She certainly enjoyed the tour, but those things in particular.

Q: How tall is your Coraline?

HENRY SELICK: My Coraline is about 8 inches tall and even when we go into the close-ups, it’s just a little face like that. There’s something about miniatures. A long time ago when I was working at Disney in the late 70s, I got a grant to work on a personal film so I was working on that at night. I made some life size stop-motion figures and later on I wished I’d made them a little smaller. There’s just something about miniature things brought to life by hand that [makes you] want to believe in them. You want to believe in them as full scale things like King Kong.

Q: What was the appeal of Coraline for you when you read the book?

HENRY SELICK: I felt it was an Alice in Wonderland that runs into a Grimm’s fairytale. I felt it was off this hook of imagining other parents, imagining a better life for yourself, and just this strange thing where… Four years ago, I finally got my mother to read the book and when she finished, she said, “You know, you used to sit in that chair in the kitchen in here when you were 4 or 5 and tell me about your other family in Africa and you would go on so convincingly that I started to worry maybe you had one.” So, I must have had some other connection there. The beautiful, strange details, this button-eyed image that’s unnerving without necessarily knowing why, the delicious cat dialogue. I loved the cat. But, most of all, I loved the character of Coraline. I loved that she’s ordinary, that she’s very curious, but in the end she’s an ordinary girl who lacks super powers or great fighting skills or weapons, as David Fincher suggested that I give her, and manages to defeat extraordinary evil.

Q: Why would he suggest such a thing?

HENRY SELICK: He read an early script and he said, “Are you out of your mind? You’ve got to give her a chainsaw or an uzi. (laughs)

Q: Was he serious or was he joking?

HENRY SELICK: He’s joking, but being David Fincher, it’s only…

Q: You gave Coraline a friend named Wybie. Neil was explaining how, for him, that was totally logical because you can’t have an interior monologue for the lead character since she needs somebody to talk to. Is it really that simple?

HENRY SELICK: I think it’s more complex. In my first draft of this screenplay, I struggled a bit. I was actually staying much too faithful to the book and not growing into a film and it was not successful. With Neil’s encouragement, I went off on my own and stopped conferring with him and just struggled to find what I needed to make it feel like a movie. Wybie was just this…I had a neighbor, a grown man who was very boyish, whose name was Wybie, short for Wyborn. There’s not very much more similarity between him and the character but that name just popped into my head and I thought of that guy. He was still surfing into his fifties, riding his bike. I was just sort of playing with if there was another kid, someone who was more her size to more directly antagonize her in a way that the strange neighbors wouldn’t necessarily.

It just felt kind of lonely without her. In the book, you know what she’s thinking and it’s great, you’re in her mind. In the Other World, the cat can talk but he can’t talk in the real world. It just felt kind of lonely and bringing Wybie in seemed to work. It took a very long time to really realize him as a character and it was only two months before we finished shooting the film that I realized I needed to have him not just talk about the grandmother but have her be a presence, to have her call for him in the background, and then finally, just that very brief shot of her at the end. It’s when I brought her in that I felt he really was living in the film.

Q: Is there any story that you want to adapt to the big screen that would incorporate real actors and stop-motion, kind of like James and the Giant Peach?

HENRY SELICK: In James and the Giant Peach I had a pretty good experience shooting a live action. It was bookends. And then in Monkeybone, I did not. It was intended to be more of the same, a fantasy world that I seem strangely drawn to over and over again was going to be all animation, but it ended up being much more live action. It’s just not my forte. It’s possible there would be a mix but it would be something minor. I thought it was astonishing and bold in Wall-E, which is one of the few films I’ve seen in the last few years, that Andrew Stanton brought in live action on the monitors with the Fred Willard recordings. It was fresh. It was good. I kind of know what I’m supposed to do. It’s not too much live action. I’m not built for that. (laughs)

Q: Can you talk about the contribution of your Japanese concept artist, Tadahiro Uesugi, in this process?

HENRY SELICK: Yes, Tadahiro Uesugi is a pretty well known illustrator/artist who is heavily influenced by late 50s/early 60s American illustrators when it was still the golden age of advertising and a lot of illustration was used to sell the American dream. Tadahiro is a guy who wears black turtlenecks. His favorite music is Burt Bacharach. He’s just this guy out of time who has this beautiful, very graphic style. On first glance, if you look at his work and you look at our film, it might be difficult to actually see the connection, but I saw him as someone to inspire the look. From Tadahiro, we got our color palette, we got sort of a sense of shape, the fantastic garden, the way those flowers aren’t all like things you know. When Coraline tries to escape from the Other World and goes through the little orchard and then the trees change shape and become very geometric forms, that’s right off of the illustration of his.

I always thought [of his work] as just sort of inspiration, not something that we could ever really copy, which we did in a couple of spots. I think one of the most important things I got from working with Tadahiro that I want to mention is, even though his work is very graphic and so it’s more flat shapes put together, he would always find a way to put a touch of atmosphere and very realistic so we could be very stylized – a little girl walking along and there’s a pool of water, but her reflection is perfect, maybe there’s a little mist or fog or rays of sun. He would take almost like a Matisse world of 2D, but by putting a touch of atmosphere, the painting breathes. So I tried to put atmosphere everywhere in the movie. 

Q: Why did you think you needed 3D?

HENRY SELICK: I’ll try to keep this brief because it’s convoluted. I had a history with 3D. I did a 3D rock video for the View-Master Corporation, the people that make those little wheels of pictures, which are still miraculous to me. Twenty years ago, there was this minor singer, this guy named Marty Balin, who had sung for Jefferson Starship, but it wasn’t about him, it was about a demo where maybe they could branch out into other 3D media. That didn’t really pan out but what did pan out was the guy whose system it was, a man named Lenny Lipton, who’s a dear friend of mine now. He’s the guy who has invented the modern 3D system in the theaters. Real D hired him and his little company a few years back and they’re at the center of this new technology. He also at age 19 wrote the words for Puff, the Magic Dragon. So, he’s a renaissance man and I was really impressed with him. As the years went by, I would always check in every few years because he was always going to be perfecting this system and it was coming along and it was very interesting and impressive.

Back in The Nightmare Before Christmas, there was a member of the crew whose hobby was shooting 3D pictures. There was this old camera, the Stereo Realist it was called. He’d shoot pictures of our puppets on the stage, send them off to the one processor in the country that would still process them and mount them in these cardboard things and they’d come back and we felt, “Man, we’re not really showing the movie to the world. They’re not getting the experience that this is capturing of us being here. I mean, I even made a joke that we might not have the best movies in animation, but we certainly have the best tour. Anyone who came to visit us was blown away by these huge, magnificent, miniature sets.

All this beautiful detail, all these artists breathing life into this wasn’t quite being captured. So there was this introduction to 3D with Lenny, then this desire to share the experience of what we were doing, and then ultimately it took a long time to get Coraline up on its feet, finally got people convinced that yes, it should be stop-motion and the story itself demanded something special like Dorothy going from black and white into a world of color and I felt 3D is the answer to all my issues. It will capture the stop-motion more effectively and underline the fact that stuff is real, it really exists, and then I could use it to draw the viewers into the Other World as Coraline is drawn into the Other World by the powers of the Other Mother.

Q: Is it going to be 3D on the DVD?

HENRY SELICK: Initially, there will be high quality 2D. There will be kind of a gimmicky 3D version as an extra, but down the road there is a really high quality home 3D system. It’ll just take a while before it permeates.

Q: But you think it still looks pretty good in 2D?

HENRY SELICK: It looks great and the color is brighter and the contrast. With a 3D, you’re basically splitting the information into the two eyes and it’s a bit like being in a cave so there’s a magic to it that’s very impressive. We didn’t just turn on the 3D when she goes into the Other World, we designed the sets differently and added color and it’s still a great experience.

Q: Did you have trouble getting this process approved at one time?

HENRY SELICK: The stop-motion? Yes, it really took the years since Nightmare. Yeah, a few years back when we were trying to launch Coraline, it was like “Well, of course we’ll do it CG because that’s what the big films are. They’re the most successful.” But there are two issues here. Nightmare had this second life and then it just sort of never went away and that was happening and then, finally, we can do these movies for way less money. I’d like to think it was a rich film experience for you, but it’s about a third the cost of a Pixar or Dreamworks movie.

Q: Do you love comics and graphic novels?

HENRY SELICK: I go sort of in and out of reading them. Certainly as a kid I sucked up everything, that Marvel stuff in particular, and then the first wave of graphic novels and Dark Knight, Watchmen, and I was introduced to the earlier work of Plastic Man and Will Eisner at that time. I haven’t been that faithful though. (laughs) But I do think that some of these graphic novels absolutely should be animation. They don’t all have to be live action or live action combos. I think some of them could very successfully translate into animation.

Q: How much of this are you going to show us on the DVD? How far are you willing to go without ruining the magic of it?

HENRY SELICK: Well I would have preferred not always showing everything, but it’s the way of things, that people think it sells the DVDs to show a little too much. There’s a making of behind the scenes. There’s also some very interesting mini-docs that are actually very artistic. Some of them are on the web right now. There’s a really good site that was created – Coraline.com -- and so there’s some very artistic, interesting things as well as games where kids can put their pictures up and then put buttons on their eyes and then their face goes on a gallery of framed pictures which is fun. So, yeah, I think we’ve gone overboard in behind the scenes and it gets [to be] a little too much of the same.

Q: And yet it’s one of the reasons that The Nightmare Before Christmas has maintained and grown the cult following that it has because of DVD. Is that a world we can actually visit again?

HENRY SELICK: Under the right circumstances, there has been talk over the years of a sequel. The worst news was at one point that Disney would like to do a sequel but it has to be CG and luckily we’ve kind of moved beyond that. Now, with John Lasseter in charge of all Disney and Pixar animation, he’s brought back 2D. He’s supporting Tim doing a stop-motion version of his old Frankenweenie and I’m showing him Coraline at Pixar on Friday the 13th of February.

Q: I’m a fan of James and the Giant Peach and I don’t think that was marketed very well.

HENRY SELICK: I appreciate that and I would have to agree.

Q: I was really disappointed.

HENRY SELICK: The good news is Disney has done pretty well with that and they’re doing a whole new Blu-Ray DVD. It’s super high end. They consulted with me and showed me and it’ll be nice to have that back out on the shelves.

Q: That’s great. Thank you.

HENRY SELICK: Thanks for coming today. It was nice to talk to you all.

“Coraline” opens in theaters on February 6th.