As any horror fan knows, it’s just damn difficult to keep the undead down. If you don’t, ask Henry Selick.
For those who don’t know, Selick is one of the top stop-motion
animation directors in the world, having comfortably settled in a
position somewhere between golden age masters like Ray Harryhausen,
George Pal and Art Clokey and modern day masters like Jan Svankmajer,
the Brothers Quay and Aardman Studios. It doesn’t take long to see he
loves working in the genre that’s truly the oldest form of animation
either.
“[As a kid I was inspired by] The early Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts in particular,” Selick reminisced over a telephone conference this weekend. “I also love the Seventh Voyage,
the best cyclops that will ever be done. There was just this wonderful
sense that Harryhausen's monsters were real, despite the sort of
lurching quality they had, they had an undeniable reality to them.
“I love all sorts of animation, probably the most beautiful would be
the traditional hand drawn animation that Disney is known for.
Stopmotion has a certain grittiness and is filled with imperfections,
and yet their is an undeniable truth, that what you see really exits,
even it if is posed by hand, 24 times a second. This truth is what I
find most attractive about stop motion animation.”
Yet his first work experience would be in traditional animation. In
1980 he was part of the legendary animation team who created Disney’s The Fox and the Hound.
This team also included Brad Bird, Don Bluth, John Lassiter and a
number of others who would become movers and shakers in the cartoon
universe.
There was another guy over there in the Magic Kingdom who Selick also
hung out with. His name was Tim Burton. Like Selick, Burton was a stop
motion fan. More important, Burton had convinced Disney to finance two
shorts using the process, Frankenweenie and Vincent. Burton got the initial idea to also do Nightmare Before Christmas there. Selick remembers it well.
“’Vincent’ was Tim's first stop motion film that he made with Rick
Heinrichs,” Selick recalled. “It had a striking look, bold design and
was basically part of Tim's growth as an artist, which influence the
look of Nightmare Before Christmas.
“I was working with Tim at Disney in the early 1980s when he first
conceived the poem and idea of Jack Skellingon taking over Christmas,”
said Selick. Sculptor Rick Heinrichs took the original characters
designed by Tim: Jack, Zero and Sandy Claws and created beautiful
maquettes that showed what they'd be like as stop motion characters. It
was originally pitched to Disney as a TV special but was rejected. I
had moved to Northern California where I worked as storyboard artist
and a stop motion filmmaker with short films, TV commercials and MTV.
While Tim went on to achieve great success in live action.”
In fact, Burton was mega-hot. His first features films, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman, had both made tons of money. Batman II and Edward Scissorhands were in the wings. That didn’t mean cinching the Nightmare deal was a fait accompli.
“There was resistance to doing it all at first,” says Selick. “When
Tim first pitched it to Disney in the early 1980s there was resistance
to the project in any medium. But 10 years later when the film was made
there was never an issue about it being stop motion. It was simply a
case of that is how Tim conceived it.”
Apparently, both Burton and Heinrichs hadn’t forgotten their old buddy
Selick either, who was making waves with his short “Slow Bob In The
Lower Dimensions.”
“I got a call from Rick and he said there was something important we
must talk about in person. He flew to San Francisco and said Tim is
making Nightmare Before Christmas
and wants you to direct it. I met with Tim and Danny Elfman and my
small crew that I had been working with immediately became supervisors
on a feature film.”
The film would then take the next three years of Selick’s life. Part
of the process was finding enough animators familiar with stop motion.
In an interview conducted a year ago, part of this problem was solved
through hiring people who worked for Art and Joe Clokey, the creators
of the last Gumby series.
“Directing stop motion animation is actually a sort of combination of
directing live action and 'regular' animation,” says Selick. “We have
real sets, real lights, real cameras. There is a costume department, a
hair department and our puppets are the actors. Like regular animation
it is a divide and conquer. It is all divided up into manageable
pieces, edited in storyboards before the movie is made and then shot a
frame a time like traditional animation.
“There was a Gumby revival by Art Clokey in the 80s and a new TV series
that followed, which attracted a lot of young stop motion animators to
California. Many of the animators for Nightmare Before Christmas
came from that group…because the Gumby project had been over for almost
three years so we did not 'take' anyone. We [also] hired several ILM
veterans to work on the original film however.
“We don't think we actually achieved a very fluid motion. It was basically made the same way the original King Kong
was made or any of Ray Harryhausen's creatures. Virtually all animation
is labor intensive, since it was what I do it did not seem any harder
than others. The small army topped out at under 200 people. Because the
range of talents and abilities, there was always something amazing and
wonderful to see virtually every day, so that the long journey of
production was re-inspired regularly. We used Disney's fledgling
effects unit in Burbank and they created the very simple snow that
falls at the end of the film. Other than that it was all pretty much
done by hand in house.”
Not that there weren’t other challenges, either.
“While virtually every bit of the stop motion animation was
challenging, there were several particularly difficult scenes to pull
off,” Selick recalled. “One began where Jack is shot out of the sky
with his Skellington Reindeer flying over head and being shot down and
lands in the arms of the angel statue in a graveyard and goes on to
sing a song there while the camera continuously circles him. The
opening song of the film ‘This is Halloween’ was monstrously
challenging as it introduced all the Halloween Town monsters to the
audience. We were [also] desperate to flesh out the town, after you go
through the mummy and vampires etc it gets slim. We used everything we
came up with.”
One character in particular, Oogie Boogie, was not only a villain in the film, but a monster to animate.
“Oogie started out as the size of a pillowcase and not that scary or
evil or important,” said Selick, “but as the story developed I felt
the need to grow him in both his scale and his role. Ultimately Danny
Eflman's ‘Oogie Boogie’ song is what truly defined his character as the
villain and Jack's role was fully defined as a misguided hero. [Still],
he was a huge puppet, very difficult to muscle around it was almost as
if he was trying to push back while you were animating him.”
Selick also recalls that Disney itself was generally highly
cooperative on the project. He recalled the Mouse Works had only one
truly objectionable note, for the man with the Tear Away Face, which
they thought was too terrifying for kids. Burton also only made some
minor modifications.
“Working with Tim was great, he came up with a brilliant idea, designed
the main characters, fleshed out the story, got Danny Elfman to write a
bunch of great songs,” said Selick. “He got the project on its feet
and then stood back and watched us fly with it. Tim, who made two
live-action features in LA while we were in San Francisco making Nightmare,
was kept in the loop throughout the process, reviewing storyboards and
animation. When we completed the film Tim came in with his editor Chris
to pace up the film and make a particular story adjust to make Lock,
Shock, and Barrel just a touch nicer.”
Then it was time for release. Mind you, Disney was on one of the
hottest streaks in the history of the studio. It had already set box
office records with its release of Aladdin,
who’s opening weekend brought in $19 million. In 1993, that was not
chump change by anyone’s standards. Powered by the voice work of Robin
Williams, it would eventually bring in $500 million internationally.
Word on the street that their next traditional animated project, 1994’s
The Lion King could potentially be bigger (which it eventually
was at $783 million). Yet inbetween was this very, very, exceedingly
strange movie about monsters delivering shrunken heads during
Christmas. To top it, Disney didn’t even brand the film as one of its
own. They shipped it over to their more adult Touchstone subsidiary.
Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas actually didn’t do bad
for its full wide screen debut. It brought in $8 million. From there
though it only went on to do a lifetime box office of $73 million, not
even 15% of what Aladdin grossed, and Nightmare was the Christmas release to boot.
“Nightmare was just too different from what Disney was
having success with,” Selick opined, “although I don't think Walt
Disney himself would have had a problem with it being labeled a Disney
film. Just check out some of the sequences from Fantasia, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Ward Kimball's goons and monsters in Sleeping Beauty and you'll see Nightmare
and it's characters were carrying on in the same tradition. While it
took sometime, about seven years ago when the Haunted Mansion at
Disneyland was transformed into a Nightmare extravaganza, we then felt
we were truly loved by the Disney label.”
But as said before, it’s truly hard to keep the undead down. One could say that after it’s inauspicious start, Nightmare developed a life of its own.
“At this point, 15 years later after the original release, I've grown
used to seeing Jack and Sallie turn up all over the place,” says
Selick. “This did not happen right away it has taken years for our
initial cult audience to grow into a pop culture phenomenon. Just this
past Halloween, we had some girls show up at the house in NBChristmas
costumes and my wife and I pointed out one of the original Jack
Skellington and the Skellington Reindeer which was in our office. It
blew their minds and they screamed with joy, taking their handfuls of
candy and went away just full of life.”
End of Part 1. The Nightmare Before Christmas 15th Anniversary Edition is due in stores on August 26th.FUNIMATION CHANNEL ADDS NEW PROGRAMS.
The FUNimation Channel will be premiering five new animated series. The
debuting titles all begin airing September 1 and include (all times are
eastern):
• Mushi-Shi (TV-14) - Mushi are neither plants nor
animals. Instead they resemble the primeval substances of life. Few
humans are aware of their existence, among them in Ginko, a ‘mushi-shi’
who studies them and investigates strange occurrences related to their
appearances.
• School Rumble (TV-PG) – This comedic drama is about the tangled love triangles of teens.
• Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (TV-PG) - This dramatic
action-adventure about four travelers on an epic journey. Their goals
are different, their destiny the same.
• BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad (TV-MA) - In this comedy
about a garage band trying to make it there is one thing to remember:
music can change your life. That doesn’t mean you’re going to like it.
• Basilisk (TV-MA) – Set in feudal Japan, the young leaders of warring ninja clans fall into a forbidden love amidst a battle for blood.
For those who miss the episodes during the week, they can catch all of
the episodes back-to-back in the weekend “rewind” on Saturdays and
Sundays. Fans should also check their local listings as other schedule
changes will take effect on September 1.
ROUGH DRAFT SIGNS DEAL WITH FOX
Rough Draft Studios, an independent animation production company, today
announced that it will be producing animation for the upcoming animated
Fox series, Down, Shut Up, from Arrested Development
creator, Mitch Hurwitz. Fox initially ordered thirteen 30-minute
episodes from producer Sony Pictures Television scheduled for broadcast
March 2009.
Sit Down, Shut Up focuses on the lives of eight self-centered
staff members at a high school in a small northeastern fishing town who
never lose sight of the fact the children must always come second.
Based on a live-action Australian comedy series of the same name, Sit Down, Shut Up
is written and executive-produced by Mitch Hurwitz, Bill Oakley and
Josh Weinstein and executive-produced by Eric and Kim Tannenbaum. It
will have a distinctive look combining 2-D animation with live action
backgrounds. Animation will be produced by Rough Draft Studios at its
Glendale facility. Voicing the principal animated characters will be
Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Henry Winkler. Kenan Thompson is also
signed on to star as the Principal of the school with Will Forte set to
play the Vice Principal. Cheri Oteri, Tom Kenny, Nick Kroll and Maria
Bamford will also provide voices for the show.
“We are thrilled to be working with such a creative and hilarious
talent as Mitch,” said Claudia Katz, Partner at Rough Draft Studios.
“As a studio that loves to work on writer driven animation Sit Down, Shut Up is a project that we’re delighted to be involved in.”
Rough Draft Studios previously collaborated with Oakley and Weinstein on Futurama,
where it produced all the animation and earned multiple Emmy’s for
their groundbreaking seamless blending of 2-D and 3-D animation.
NEXT COLUMN: Selick talks about working with a certain Mr. Gaiman on a film called Coraline.
