ARTIST AND MODEL Selick has his star in the palm of his hand.

For more about Coraline, listen to our interview with Henry Selick on the TOC blog.

If you’ve seen Henry Selick’s films (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach), you know he prefers his children’s entertainment on the creepy-crawly side. But in person, Selick’s soft voice and mild demeanor can lull you into missing his sly wit and unexpected bluntness. When we remark that the press notes for his new film Coraline stress the use of state-of-the-art computer effects to enhance the old-fashioned stop-motion animation, he replies drily, “I think they’re overselling the CG component a little in the production notes. Everyone’s afraid that if it’s old, no one will come.”

You don’t often hear a director undermining the hype of the press notes, but Selick speaks with the under-the-radar candor of a man who has quietly thrived at the margins of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. Selick is so far on the margins that many people think Tim Burton directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (Burton produced the film and the full title is Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but Selick directed it). Selick doesn’t even work in Hollywood; Laika, the company behind Coraline, is located in Portland, Oregon.

From that safe distance, Selick can skip the usual propaganda. While Jeffrey Katzenberg has been touring the country declaring 3-D (and Paramount’s Monsters vs. Aliens) as the inevitable next step for all cinema, Selick is more cautious. “3-D is not going to save the movie business,” says Selick, “but used well with the right story, it’s going to enhance the experience for the right films.”

In Coraline, Selick has the right film. Based on a children’s book by Neil Gaiman, Coraline takes up the age-old theme of alternate worlds with their own crazy logic (cf. Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz). After her overworked and distracted parents move Coraline to a weird old house, she finds a door that leads to another world. There, she meets Other Mother and Other Father, who would be ideal parents if it weren’t for their button eyes and a lingering sense that something is wrong.

Selick and his crew thought long and carefully about how to exploit 3-D without resorting to gimmicks. “We developed sort of a script for the whole film of how we would use 3-D,” he explains, “minimizing it in the real world that Coraline lives in and then bringing it up in the other world.”

Selick’s relationship to computers is complicated—not surprising in someone who practices the very old-school stop-motion animation technique. On Coraline, he used computers to do things like erasing the armature holding the puppets in place in some shots, but he refused to use computers to animate logistically demanding sequences, like one involving a mouse circus. “Many moments where it could have been more easily done with CG, I fought pretty hard to make them be stop-motion.”

Selick would love it if everyone saw Coraline in 3-D on a big screen, but he’s a pragmatist. “There will be people enjoying this on two-inch screens. People like being able to pick and choose where and how they’re going to see their movie, and home theaters are getting ever better. Blu-ray DVDs are highly detailed. So 42-inch screen, Blu-ray will be great. I actually think it will be a great version of the film.” He pauses, and that sly wit asserts itself again. “People will buy a new television before they’ll eat food.”

Coraline is in theaters now.

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