Henry Selick Quotes

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.

Unless you have kids, you actually have no idea what kids are watching on TV these days.

We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money.

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

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.

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.

People spend the money where the money is. Nightmare never goes away.

It's nice to be taken seriously.

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.

I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.

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.

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

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.

I learned my lesson that in the live-action world, you have to earn the support of people over a very, very long time. And in animation, I already have the support.

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.

I think that one of the things that I can do is I seem to have the ability to zoom in super tight for very small details, but then jump back for sort of that big picture perspective. And I think that ultimately, that's one of my strengths, because you have - every detail matters.

There's the animation ghetto of feature films in this country. There's this flavor at DreamWorks, and Pixar does their own thing, and generally they're safe. But if you look at Walt Disney's original films, at the time and in the context, they weren't safe. They were really dark and troubling.

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.

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.

This Golden Globe nomination is sweet validation for the years of hard work it took to bring Coraline to life using stop-motion animation with the greatest crew of animators, artists, and technicians I've ever been privileged to work with. I share this nomination with all of them and we all share our thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press.

Making 'Coraline' was one of the great filmmaking experiences of my life.

Anyone can buy CG technology. It's not that it's easy to make those films. Those films are just as difficult, they're incredibly hard to make.

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.

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.

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.

People are always telling me that boys won't go to girls' movies and vice versa. It's not true.

Kids love to be scared - there's way to do it right, and ways to do it wrong.

There's definitely the desire out there for young people who want to make the movies.

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.

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.

'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.

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.

Very few people have made the transition from animation to live-action; I'm certainly not one.

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.

Just like those little Viewmaster slides, there's a inherent magic that's captured in 3D that you can't get in drawn animation or in CG.

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.