I tricked them again," says American film's premier puppeteer, Henry Selick. He knows that Coraline may be the crowning achievement of his thoroughly idiosyncratic list of credits, including The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993).
Selick's Roald Dahl adaptation, James and the Giant Peach (1996), came out one year before Pixar's Toy Story popped the eyes of audiences, critics and studio executives, who were too quick to predict the death of traditional cartoons.
Yet Selick has persevered to bring a type of animation rooted in antique theater - stop-motion or puppet animation - into the 21st century. His movies rely on artisans making physical models of characters and sets, then altering them frame by frame for maximum expressiveness and movement.
Congratulate Selick over the phone on bringing his painstaking craftsmanship into today's world and he's quick to point out that in one recent movie season (fall 2005), the great British stop-motion animator Nick Park made Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton made Corpse Bride . Burton's film was blissfully entertaining and Park's was a comic masterpiece, yet no one in Hollywood started clamoring for more stop-motion. In fact, since each grossed less than giant computer-animated hits, they made executives believe that the audience for stop-motion had dried up.
But Selick says, "When we finally got to the point where all animation was CG [computer graphics], stop-motion started to look fresh again. What's old becomes new."
When Selick adds digital filming and 3-D to the process in Coraline, he creates a universe as pictorially and emotionally complete as any computer animation, but with none of the tired mimicry and hyper-realism that afflicts a lot of non-Pixar CG.
The look of Coraline is out-of-this-world, and it's out-of-this-world for a purpose. The script Selick has written from Neil Gaiman's young-adult novel is about a girl who finds a passage between a home with her distracted mother and father to one where her self-proclaimed "Other Mother" and "Other Father" dote on her and shower her with surprises. The "Other World," at first, presents home-sweet-home as a comic Shangri-La - and the comedy grows darker as the movie goes along. With nothing to do before her school year starts, Coraline drifts deeper into the clutches of the Other World until the film becomes The Nightmare Before Labor Day. It's a movie about a child learning not to let loneliness get the better of her. It's also about parents learning that they should befriend as well as discipline their child.
