Stop-motion master Henry Selick brings the color to The Life Aquatic with his creatures. All The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou images © 2004 Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. All rights reserved.

Henry Selick makes stop-motion animated films. The concept is not shocking. But just try explaining it to your nine-year-old nephew, whose computer is probably faster than yours and who knows how many effects shots there were in Attack of the Clones. Stop-motion is trés hip to those in the know, but to the general public it barely registers. Yes, The Nightmare Before Christmas rocked, but that was 11 years ago. Chicken Run was a hit, but most people probably think Aardman’s plasticine models were CG. And some prominent media personalities already think that Selick’s stop-motion fish creations in The Life Aquatic, which opens nationwide this week, were just sloppy computer work. (A.O. Scott’s critique of the film’s “computer-animated fish” in his New York Times review is a grim reminder that you don’t have to start with the press kit, and you don’t have to end with it, but reading it is more than good manners.)

In our all-digital modern age you can count Hollywood’s big-screen practitioners of stop-motion animation on two thumbs. I mean, stop-motion? What the hell? They didn’t have that elective in college. Simply put, there’s no explaining Selick’s career choice. It’s like radio drama. Nobody does it. Except the people who do it.

It’s a niche thing, and Wes Anderson, director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, knows niche. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his latest film, which he directed and co-wrote with Noah Baumbach, Anderson exercises his eccentricity underwater, and Selick has come to his aid with his beautiful and incongruously analog brand of animated critters.

The Life Aquatic is Anderson’s fourth feature, and his third under the aegis of a sweet indie deal at the very un-indie Disney Studios. Bill Murray plays a has-been oceanographer named Steve Zissou who’s been pumping out underwater documentaries for decades and is about to call it quits. He is joined on what may be his last mission, a quest for the dreaded jaguar shark, by his wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), a magazine reporter (Cate Blanchett), a needy underling tired of being on the B-team (Willem Dafoe), his long-time financier (Michael Gambon), a rival oceanographer (Jeff Goldblum) and a pilot who may also be his long-lost son (Owen Wilson).

Naturally most of the film is spent in close communion with creatures of the sea, and all the fish odd and beautiful enough to earn a closeup were created by Selick and his team of stop-motion animators. Anderson chose animation for the practical reason that his sugar crabs, pony-fishes and paisley octopi don’t exist. He chose stop-motion animation, and Selick, for more poetic reasons: Like Anderson, Selick’s aesthetic is old school.

Selick has had no end of work lately. Since joining Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon, this June, it was announced in September that Selick would direct a feature-length version of Neil Gaiman’s best-selling children’s book Coraline, a Vinton co-production with Bill Mechanic’s Pandemonium Films. Coraline is a supernatural thriller about a young girl, a locked door and the looking-glass world of danger on the other side, and has a tendency to grab readers and make them devour its 162 pages in one two-hour sprint to the finish.

Then this October, the trades reported that Anderson would make a stop-motion version of the Roald Dahl classic The Fantastic Mr. Fox for Sony’s Revolution Studios. The 1970 favorite from the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory details the adventures of Mr. Fox as he goes up against three unpleasant farmers in an attempt to feed his family. One name springs to mind for a prospective animation director for the film, but is Selick actually attached to the project?

Selick discussed this and other topics this week in a chat with AWN, touching on The Life Aquatic, his upcoming feature projects and his upcoming short subject Moongirl. First, though, he teased with a new factoid regarding one of his earliest film credits, Twice Upon a Time, a 1983 animated feature directed by John Korty and produced by Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. that still hasn’t made it to DVD.