Henry Selick

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Henry Selick

Selick (left) and Tim Burton (right) during production of The Nightmare Before Christmas
Born November 30, 1952 (1952-11-30) (age 56)
Glen Ridge, New Jersey, United States
Occupation film director, producer, stop motion animator, character designer and storyboard artist
Years active 1980 - Present
Spouse(s) Heather Selick

Henry Selick (born November 30, 1952) is an American stop motion director, producer and writer who is best known for directing The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. He studied at the Program in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, under the guidance of renowned teacher Jules Engel.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and raised in nearby Rumson,[1] Selick did little but draw from ages three to 12. Selick's fascination with animation came at a young age, when he first saw both Lotte Reiniger's stop-motion movie The Adventures of Prince Achmed, and the animated creatures of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad by Ray Harryhausen.

After studying science at Rutgers University and art at Syracuse University and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, Selick eventually enrolled at CalArts to study animation. While a student at CalArts, his two student films, Phases and Tube Tales, were nominated for Student Academy Awards.

[edit] Film work

[edit] Disney

After his academic studies, he went to work for Walt Disney Studios as an "in-betweener" and animator trainee on such films as Pete's Dragon and The Small One. He became a full-fledged animator under Glen Keane on The Fox and the Hound. During his time at Disney, he met and worked around the likes of Tim Burton, Rick Heinrichs, Jorgen Klubien, Brad Bird, John Musker, Dan Haskett, Bill and Sue Kroyer, Ed Gombert, and Andy Gaskill. Years later, he claimed he learned a lot to improve his drawing, animation, and storytelling skills from Disney legend Eric Larson.

[edit] Freelance work

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Selick was able to make the short film Seepage, which won an award. Then he spent several years freelancing in the Bay Area, directing still-famous commercials for the Pillsbury Doughboy and Ritz Crackers, and sequences of John Korty's animated feature Twice Upon a Time. He also storyboarded fantasy sequences for Walter Murch’s Return to Oz and Carroll Ballard's Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (with designs by Maurice Sendak). When he created an acclaimed series of MTV station IDs and an award-winning six-minute pilot for an animated series called Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, Selick attracted the attention of director Tim Burton, whom he had known at CalArts, and was catapulted into features directing.

[edit] The Nightmare Before Christmas

Selick made his feature-directing debut in 1993 on Burton's production The Nightmare Before Christmas — the first full-length, stop-motion feature from a major American studio. An instant holiday classic, Nightmare was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and won the International Animated Film Society's Annie Award for Best Creative Supervision, beating out The Lion King.

[edit] James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone

In 1996, Selick followed with a second feature, James and the Giant Peach, his live-action/stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic children’s book. This innovative and technically complicated film didn't do well in the box office, but it did receive widespread critical acclaim (Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel said it was even better than the book [2]), and it won the top prize for an animated feature at the Annecy Film Festival in 1997.

Selick’s third feature was Monkeybone, a live action/stop-motion adaptation of an underground comic. The film was a flop both commercially and critically.

[edit] Life Aquatic and Moongirl

After developing stop-motion animation on Wes Anderson's feature The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Selick joined the Portland, Oregon-based animation studio LAIKA in mid-2004 as supervising director for feature film development. After joining LAIKA, Selick directed his first computer-generated animation film, the award-winning short film Moongirl, the inspiration for Candlewick Press's children's book of the same name.

[edit] Coraline

Selick's first feature with LAIKA is Coraline, which is based on the book by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman and was released in 2009. It is the first three-dimensional stop-motion animation movie. The film has received generally positive reviews from critics.

[edit] Style and creative temperament

Joe Ranft, a late friend and collaborator of Selick's, once stated in an interview that Selick had a "rock 'n' roll-meets-Da Vinci temperament".[citation needed] In Ranft's words "He'll still go off to his office to play guitar or electric piano to ease off and think", but at the same time Selick operates scientifically. "He gets an outrageous premise-something that comes from a real dream place-then approaches the aesthetics of it like a mechanical engineer: What can we build on this foundation, how do we buttress it? If we have a mechanical shark, how does it kill? Will it shoot things from its snout?" Ranft once said Selick has an uncanny gift: "He can articulate things through animation that people couldn't say otherwise."

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Beckerman, Jim. "A FUZZY NIGHTMARE, BROUGHT TO SCREEN", The Record (Bergen County), April 7, 1996. Accessed December 13, 2007. "We were literally rolling a 20-foot peach, says Selick, a Rumson native..."
  2. ^ [1]

[edit] External links



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Films directed by Henry Selick
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