“Stop motion is live action in miniature”: Henry Selick in conversation

At the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s, Henry Selick was one of the few students who attended both the Disney-centric character animation course and the one for experimental animation. That duality presaged things to come. Selick has always had one foot in the big studios, directing his stop-motion features at the likes of Disney (The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993), Laika (Coraline, 2009) and Netflix (Wendell & Wild, 2022). Yet these films bristle with a strangeness, a streak of ghoulish surrealism that feels subversive in this world.

Selick has used stop-motion puppet animation in all five of his features, sometimes alongside live action. “I love the physical nature,” he says. “You’re standing more – you’re not just sitting doing animation on a screen or drawing on paper on a desktop. I like that environment: it’s live action in miniature.” His devotion to the technique is itself rather radical. Stop motion seemed destined to decline as CG animation rose in the 1990s and it remains marginal at major studios. Yet recent decades have seen something of a revival. For Selick, the technique is a “ritual magic” whose roots run down to the earliest trick films: it is too old to die.

Experimenter that he is, Selick has also embraced new magic along the way, adopting cutting-edge technology when it suits him. One example: 3D, used in Coraline to demarcate the uncanny parallel universe from the real world. A remastered version of the film hits cinemas in August to mark its 15th anniversary. Ahead of the release – and BFI Southbank’s Stop Motion season, where he will be a guest speaker – I talked to Selick about his art and craft.

You’ve spoken about the “imperfection” of stop motion. When directing, you have to decide how to balance preserving imperfections with not making it poor quality. How do you do that?

It’s a never-ending issue, when I’m working on films, of how perfect is too perfect, how rough is too rough, and why am I doing stop motion? I do try to embrace the idea that stop motion is going to have imperfections. [When you’re animating] you can’t go back – you don’t have assistants to fill in, in between [frames]. It’s a personal journey of the animator living through their puppet. The essence of the performance is there. If I believe in the character, then small bumps and missteps along the way shouldn’t matter.

The history of stop motion as an effect was to make it as real as possible. But then CG replaced stop motion for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park [1993]. To go for that kind of perfection became ludicrous. While some people continue to do it, I think that when you can’t tell the difference between stop motion and CG, why are you doing it? That’s the main thing: I still want to feel that this was touched by a real person. Jan Švankmajer’s ideas are so strong that the execution of the animation didn’t need to be perfect. It would have been hurt if it was too perfect.

It’s sometimes hard for animators: they don’t want to feel like they’re doing purposely bad work. I want their work to be great and their performances to be believable. But I don’t shoot everything on ones [ie, one new image per frame, ensuring maximum fluidity]. A lot of people in feature-quality stop motion, that’s all they do.

There are different kinds of imperfection. You’re talking about the fluidity of the animation, but then in Wendell & Wild, we see the seams in the characters’ faces. Why did you make that choice?

It’s what I wanted to do back in Coraline. We came up with this way to expand the vocabulary of facial performance by putting the seam in faces, so that you could mix different brow movements and so forth with [different expressions for] the lower face. And then you were left to do more with less, although we ended up making hundreds and hundreds of faces.

But I wanted to leave the seams in [for Coraline]. My feeling was – and I know it’s true – that after just a few minutes, the audience doesn’t see it anymore. It was a way to tell you that we’re bringing art, puppets, to life. But [Nike co-founder] Phil Knight, who is the money behind the studio [Laika]… was afraid of that. It bothered him too much. So we digitally painted out all the seams. It was an unnecessary expense.

You use replacement animation for most of your characters’ faces and heads [ie, the parts in question are entirely replaced between frames, rather than being manipulated through internal mechanics]. What is it about the technique that you like?

Generally, I like to mix it up, depending on what kind of role the character has. If they’re more cartoonish, broader characters, I tend to go with mechanical faces. In Coraline, the father and Other Father are mechanical, with a huge range of motion.

There are two reasons why I gravitated to replacement animation. Going back to the commercials I did a long time ago: there was a character – I don’t know if he was international or not – called the Pillsbury Doughboy. He’s selling these baked-good products and he’s a cute little larva of a guy. When this company I was working with was awarded a series of commercials, we got the secret kit: you open it up and there’s this smelly body made from toxic chemicals and like seven heads to do everything [with replacement animation]. We expanded the number of faces. He wasn’t going to become a great actor – he was still going to be this very positive, fun little character – but I became fascinated by how much you can achieve with complete head replacements.

Coming on to Jack Skellington [from The Nightmare Before Christmas]: he’s basically like the Pillsbury Doughboy. The whole head gets replaced – it’s a very simple design. I love that character. There are many more ranges of expressions and emotions, and he had to do a lot more, but still, in terms of total heads, it’s in the hundreds, not thousands. I love the idea of: what can you convey with that limitation? With strong expressions and great designs, if they’re in character, the audience will buy it. It evolved from splitting faces, or different types of replacement, where the face is like a mask, like Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach [1996]: you’re not replacing the entire head.

There are people like Guillermo del Toro, who completely disagrees. He wanted to go with clockwork mechanical faces for his Pinocchio [2022], and it works well for him. But it’s not what I do.

In Coraline and Wendell & Wild, there are more human characters than in your earlier features. Are they easier or harder to design and animate than non-humans?

The more realistic humans… are always the hardest to design. You look at Disney films and there was an animator, Milt Kahl – he was perhaps the best animator and character designer of all time. But he always got stuck doing the straight characters. He really wanted to animate villains, because they’re so much more fun. But they needed the very best to do the humans. Coraline took a very long time to design – to find the right balance of elements. And in [Wendell & Wild], the protagonist, Kat, also. They matter more, because that’s what you want your audience to focus on. You end up trying more things out before you settle on something you think is going to work.

Was it your idea to use 3D in Coraline?

Yeah. I know the guy, who died [in 2022]: Lenny Lipton, who pretty much developed the modern 3D projection system. He was a very interesting renaissance guy. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ [which were adapted for the 1963 hit song by Peter, Paul and Mary] when he was, like, 19 [in 1959]. The money he made from that song over the years… helped to fuel some of his experiments. I did some projects with him and I would check in with him at least once a year to see how [his technology] was coming along.

When it looked like Coraline had a chance to get made, he showed me the latest version of it. Of course, what he showed me, with electronic shutter glasses, was beyond what anyone in the theatres had ever seen. He said he’d sold this to a company, RealD, who were going to start putting it into theatres. That was my eureka moment. Coraline has to go into another world. In the original Wizard of Oz [1939], Dorothy goes into a world of colour, which at that time was a rare thing in feature films. Coraline could go from her flattened, less colourful life into a very expansive, deep world of 3D. It’s not that 3D hadn’t been done in the past, but it was always done as a gimmick – the 1950s sorts of films that gave people headaches, when the technology was weak.

[We] really went overboard in designing the film and the story to go hand in hand with the technique. The sets in the real world were compressed and literally flattened. The animators hated me for doing that! Maybe I went overboard. But I wanted the sense that when she goes through the tunnel into the other world, it just goes deep. When things go bad, I started shifting the 3D to not just be deep but to come at you and be uncomfortable, when she discovers this other world is a dangerous place.

There was a 3D society [the Advanced Imaging Society] that voted on the best 3D movie of the year. I didn’t even attend, because I assumed Avatar [2009] was going to win, but our film won. I still haven’t been able to collect my award.

Coraline in remastered 3D is in UK cinemas now. The BFI Stop Motion season runs from 1 August to 9 October and the exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame is part of it from 12 August