Words matter. These are the best Henry Selick Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s this long tradition of… even ‘Where The Wild Things Are,’ which many people consider the best kids’ picture book of all time. It was considered revolutionary, and some libraries wouldn’t carry it. But it’s a classic because it taps into empowerment for kids, kids facing dangers and winning.
CG can do anything, but it can’t do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be – clay, bits of wire, Barbie dolls, Legos. They want to tell little stories.
People are very harsh critics of animated humans.
While I was making ‘Coraline’ I barely got to see any films at all, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.
What stop-motion does best is present real objects magically brought to life in a very imperfect situation; the hand of the artist is there, the electricity of someone touching, massaging and torturing themselves to get life out of an inanimate object.
I’m meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It’s more my problem than Hollywood’s. I’m not attuned to Hollywood.
No one’s ever going to make a PG-13 animated film unless David Fincher executive produces it and puts it out on Netflix, and then if it’s a success everyone will change.
Morals always sound like cliches, but usually cliches are based on things that are ultimate truths. Be grateful for what you have; appreciate what’s right there in front of you.
I have more faith in doing something creative for a cable station or something like Yahoo or Google or Amazon. What Netflix did with ‘House of Cards’ and David Fincher was brilliant. That is inspiring to me. I think there is more chance for creativity in animation, it just hasn’t happened there yet.
Nobody does animation better than Disney; it’s just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.
Cyclops, that’s like this primal fear. I had dreams for years that the Cyclops was a small creature living in our huge fish tank at home, and at night, it was going to grow to full size and come after me.
I was at Disney for about four years, so I made good friends there. It was a time of not a lot of creativity. It was the end of the first great era, with a few of the original animators. They called them the Nine Old Men. I learned a lot from them, but it wasn’t going to be a future home for me.
There’s very few people who want to just make beautiful films that make money, when they can make films that make huge money.
Unless you have kids, you actually have no idea what kids are watching on TV these days.
Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there’d be no point in it.
You know, I love stop-motion. I’ve done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I’ve done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, ‘Moongirl,’ for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.
In all animation, if it’s done quickly, you’ll know it. And if you’re very slow and careful with it, it’s going to look a little more beautiful. It’s just compressing time into seconds.
When you’re writing, it’s all up to you, and you don’t have to make any compromises. And when you’re directing, there’s this intense pleasure you get from working with all these really talented people, and pooling the efforts towards a common goal. I like all the aspects of film-making.
Any type of animation, it could be really super crude or very sophisticated, it doesn’t mean anything if we don’t make this point in this shot, this one here and this one here. There’s the saying, ‘One shot, one thought.’ It’s pretty much a true way to go.
What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark – not too dark – fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that’s really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.
As a director, I’m not the one animating every frame, every shot. I’m moving around like a surgeon on rounds, or a farmer checking in on all the plants being grown, pruning and adjusting. For me, it’s a very exciting job.
