The Oscars: Selick Talks More Coraline
Check out Coraline in the 2010 AWN Oscar Showcase!
Henry Selick was in town for the Annie's last week, so we chatted about the significance of Coraline, his thoughts on the competition and moving back to Northern California.
Bill Desowitz: Congratulations again. How are you?
Henry Selick: I'm happy. It's been a rare feeling to have it last for such a long time -- more than one day. It's nice.
BD: What are you proud of?
HS: I remain especially pleased with the chances that were taken that paid off: some of the scenes that were difficult to shoot like the floor falling away and dropping into a giant spider web, which we had to cut out of steel and figure out how to rig it. I was asking people to go places they hadn't gone before. For the most part, it all worked out. I'm still warm and fuzzy about it and have no regrets about what wound up on screen.
BD: And adapting Neil Gaiman's book?
HS: I still feel that my job was to translate a great book into a film and not lose the fans. And for the most part, the fans of Neil and the book have embraced the film as well. They may not like all the changes, but what they love about the film seems to override their quibbles.
BD: What about the technical achievements on Coraline using digital technology?
HS: Where new technology was helpful was in a couple of important ways: One is that we shot it with digital cameras and captured it digitally; and the animators are able to look at their entire shot. Of course, there's a lot of navel gazing where the animators keep looking at their stuff over and over and over again: 10 frames, 20 frames. It can actually hurt the performance. So on the next movie, I have to find a way to put some kind of a limiting thing -- I don't know. It'll be a cultural shift -- a challenging one.
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Henry Selick's stop-motion efforts can't overcome the lame story of Coraline. Gaiman's soulless, morally bankrupt stories are best suited to disaffected youths, who lack the depth or wisdom to realize their emperor has no clothes. Gaiman's stories are tossed together with little thought. Despite all of the amazing visuals, Gaiman manages to bore the audience. His half-assed story weights down the project. Beowulf, Mirrormask, Coraline, are all awful and depressing. A film made from a Gaiman story is like a brightly wrapped package with a lump of coal inside, disappointing.
Actually I don't want Coraline to win. Pixar fans will see it as a huge snub and rant about it everywhere on the net. A better way to appreciate Coraline is giving it 10 stars at IMDb.com. With enough votes, maybe it could eventually get a higher rating than Up or even get to the top of the top 250. I'm not saying that it won't take a lot of patience or less than a decade to achieve, but the people at Laika has been extremely patient in making the movie, so we should be patient too in helping to give them the recognition they so badly deserve.
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