Word: selick
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...Americans have been obliged to wear 3D glasses as essential entertainment accessories. My Bloody Valentine sent pokers and pickaxes jutting out of the screen; the Monsters vs. Aliens commercial shown Sunday during the Super Bowl featured a profusion of protrusions. And here, on a more elevated plane, is Henry Selick's Coraline, the first stop-motion animation feature shot in the process. (It's also being shown in a "flat" version.) There's so much 3D around - with plenty more coming this year - that "four eyes" is no longer an insult; it's become a crucial movie demographic...
...Coraline (pronounced core-align), which Selick adapted from a kids' book by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, begins with a needle thrust in the viewer's eye. Mostly, though, 3D is used to heighten the picture's antirealistic, otherworldly mood. The illusion of depth is boldly stylized; the scene of a front yard or a kitchen will be a series of flat surfaces, like the planes in a pop-up picture book. This is the animated film as art film. Coraline doesn't try to ingratiate; it just looms, like a cemetery gate, daring curious souls to tiptoe in and fend...
...Burton's" was actually Henry Selick's; he directed the film under Burton's supervision. Selick next directed James and the Giant Peach, which managed to improve on the Roald Dahl children's book, and Monkeybone, a pretty frantic mix of live-action and animation. All these films owe less to the chipper confections of Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks than to Euro-cartoonery like The Triplets of Belleville and the work of Czech animator Jiri Trnka...
...Selick made the film at Laika, the Oregon animation outfit owned by Nike cofounder Phil Knight. The studio formerly housed the facilities of stop-motion producer Will Vinton, who'd done Oscar-winning shorts and The PJs. Knight, a stockholder in Vinton's company, took over the place essentially to please his son Travis, who'd been a junior animator under Vinton. It's the grand gesture of which only zillionaires are capable. A man sees his child merrily playing with model trains, so he buys the kid Amtrak...
...Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas Every Burton film is Halloween scary and candy-cane sweet. So it's appropriate that the fevered imagineer (Beetlejuice, the Batman films, Edward Scissorhands) dreamed up this stop-motion fable about a Halloween ghoul who wants to play Santa Claus. Directed by Henry Selick, Nightmare is Disney's weirdest cartoon ever: chilly, rollicking, endlessly inventive. And it's animated by Danny Elfman's magical-spookical score. Is this the first Hollywood musical to set every one of its 10 songs in a minor...