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….