Down the Rabbit Hole

Interview: Coraline director Henry Selick

by Sam Adams

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With the way Hollywood is touting 3-D as the way to pry audiences away from their TVs, you'd think it was the 1950s. But where vintage 3-D was a gimmick designed to impart a sense of occasion, the process used on Henry Selick's Coraline attempts to suck the audience in rather than poke out their eyes.

"Whenever I've seen 3-D, it's always been about pushing things toward the audience," says Coraline author Neil Gaiman, who sent Selick his book well before it was published. "Here, it's about things receding from the audience. There's an amazing sense of depth."

In a sense, 3-D is a natural fit for Selick's distinctive stop-motion animation, best known from The Nightmare Before Christmas (which, notwithstanding Tim Burton's possessory credit, was directed solely by Selick). Where CGI animators are faced with the task of adding a third dimension to a flat computer image, stop-motion is created by posing physical objects with real mass and texture. The action was already in 3-D. The trick was figuring out how to shoot it.

Selick, points out that the new RealD process is based on stereoscopic photography, which dates back to the 19th century. "As we were doing Nightmare and James and the Giant Peach, there was always a 3-D hobbyist on set, shooting stills," Selick says. "You'd see them and get this sort of longing, this sense that we're not sharing the sense of what these films actually are with the audience. 3-D was really the way to do it."

These days, one automatically associates eye-popping effects with digital technology, but the vast majority of Coraline's wonders were created by hand. It would have been easier to create a circus of cartwheeling mice or a theater full of clapping Scotch terriers with a computer, but had they compromised, Selick says, "There wouldn't have been anything valuable in those scenes."

Selick admits there were "some conversations" with the film's producers about the time and expense necessary to do things by hand (although he points out that, on the whole, stop-motion is far more economical than CGI). But a for a stop-motion diehard like Selick, nothing else will do. "I don't want to sit in my house all day drawing cute foxes, or sit at a computer terminal," he says. "I like to move things."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)