Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

Kids love to be scared; we all do. But there's a difference between leaving them hanging out there, with their fears, and then bringing them safely home. Kids love it when someone like them stands up against real evil, something really horrendous and frightening, and win.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

Puppets seem like vampires sometimes. They live, and you're depleted.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

Underneath this tired, middle-aged exterior, I'm an 11 year old kid.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

If you're drawing humans, it can be detrimental to be too naturalistic, which is like animating little corpses.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

There's very few people who want to just make beautiful films that make money, when they can make films that make huge money.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

I think it's important that kids see another kid - Coraline - who doesn't have guns, she doesn't have super-powers, she's not a super-genius. To see a pretty normal kid - I mean, she's probably a little more curious, a little more stubborn, but she's a real kid - go up against something that's truly dark and evil and powerful. And she does win.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of the Spirits' and Kurosawa's 'Ran.' And by other American illustrators and painters.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

Having to make a blockbuster every time puts unhealthy pressure on creatives. The pressure on the filmmakers is so intense, I think it stifles the creativity.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.

Henry Selick
Henry Selick

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.