Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman (The Tick) and critic David Sims (The Atlantic) covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want. It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films. They just ended their review of the films of Henry Selick.
For those who don't know, Selick is the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I should clarify, if there's any confusion, he is the director of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas". So heavy is the Burton influence, and imposition of his name over the title that it's a film easily mistaken as a Burton film.
It's true that the film owes so much to its association with Burton, it's really Selick's direction, his sense of style, and his innovations in the world of filming stop motion animation, that make it stand out so boldy. The things we ascribe almost exclusively with Burton - the morbid humour, the gothic sensibilities, the fascination with the ugly, gross, freakish and abnormal, the just plain weird -- those are traits that Selick shares with Burton, and maybe perhaps trumps Burton in his fascination with them.
In all of Selick's films (well, I can't speak to the live-action/animation debacle of Monkeybone, which I didn't watch) there is an underworld, or at least an alternate world, for the protagonists to venture through. They seem perhaps a darker place of existence that may at first appear to be something brighter because of their sheer difference. In Nightmare, there are many alternate worlds operating outside of the "real world", and through Jack Skellington, we inhabit probably the darkest of them all (and yet it's still full of joy and glee). In James and the Giant Peach, James goes from a live action world to an animated one, where he befriends clothed bugs as they travel across the Atlantic in a gigantic piece of fruit. In Coraline there's the other realm, one that mirrors Coraline's own familiar, tiny world, only where everything is just as she (thinks she) wants it - happier, more attentive parents, more fun/less annoying neighbours, joys and delights meant for her. In Wendell and Wild, the titular demon brothers live in an underworld realm that's largely inhabited by their father, a giant with an amusement park built on his belly.
In each of Selick's four stop-motion animated films, there is a character longing for a different reality, a different existence and then it finds its way to them. In Nightmare, Jack wants something more than what he has, more than scares and frights, he wants joys and delights, even though they are sometimes two sides of the same coin so he takes the joyous of them all as if he is entitled to it. In James..., James' orphaned existence with his sadistic aunts is even a few notches below that of Harry Potter on the misery index. Coraline in Coraline is lonely, sad and angry, and her parents can't bother to even look at her when she's talking to them...so when another realm presents itself, even with creepier undertones presenting, she's eager to be there. In Wendell & Wild, we have two demons who are subjugated by their father, and long to be above ground, and they're willing to manipulate a traumatized 13-year-old longing for her own escape to get it.
Each stop-motion picture finds Selick dealing with a particular challenge. For Nightmare, he's making a full-blown musical, and it really pushed the envelope in terms of complex camera work to get a really sweeping cinematic feel. With James... Selick has an extended, 20-minute, live-action set piece that has real-life James (Paul Terry), experiencing every misery in the gross environment of his aunties Spiker and Sponge's (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes) ramshackle cliffside manor. It's a very contained set, but also finds Selick using his tricks of design and forced perspective on a live-action scale. Coraline found Selick working with 3D during the brief window of 3D-mania, and (having seen it on the big screen in 3D, I can attest) may be the only great 3D movie of the era. Watching it in 2D recently, you can see there are moments that would have popped so much more in 3D... it's something even digital animation couldn't do that perhaps only stop-motion could, taking advantage of that extra dimension. With Wendell & Wild, Selick wanted to step outside of telling a kid's story, securing a PG-13 commitment from Netflix before getting started, and so the question is, what can (and what should) he do with that increased latitude?
In every instance, Selick had either a collaborator, or some guiding point. The discourse on Blank Check was that Selick is a bit of a difficult personality, and can get pretty heated with studios and interference in his work, so obviously it would take a special kind of relationship to get a project off the ground, and then completed. With Nightmare he had Burton and Danny Elfman (not to diminish the contributions of Caroline Thompson who reworked the screenplay and songs and was dating Elfman at the time). With James... he had the guidance of Roal Dahl's book, and Neil Gaiman's book for Coraline. For Wendell & Wild, he found an enthusiastic partner in Jordan Peele, who helped rewrite and refocus the script as well as produce and co-star in. There is the stamp of all these collaborators on these projects, and there aren't huge leaps going from the works of Burton to Dahl to Gaiman to Peele. They're not direct parallels, but they don't skew too far from one another stylistically.
So few and far between were major stop-motion pictures, and so potent was Burton's name associated with Nightmare, that most major, non-Aardman Studios (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) stop releases, were probably attributed to Burton by the public at large for decades. I know I thought James... was Burton-affiliated somehow (I guess he was producer). The next big stop-motion release after James was called "Tim Burton's" Corpse Bride" which Burton is actually credited as co-directing, further solidifying the confusion around Nightmare. As such, most Laika studios productions - Coraline, Parnorman, Boxtrolls - were perceived as being Burton-related by the masses, which, if not to the detriment of the film itself likely was detrimental to the directors and studio. At the same time, Nightmare unfortunately created a sort of template for what an American stop-motion animation film should be - for kids, but a little creepy and weird. That's the milieu that Selick operates in anyway, but it has hindered productions that aren't that, like Laika's Missing Link (which took in $26 million in box office, compared to the similarly themed, CGI Smallfoot, which was a massive $214 million success).
Nightmare has become such a cultural juggernaut over the past 25 years, spanning Hallowe'en to Christmas, it resurrects itself every year as a double-dipping holiday staple. It's so visually striking it's inspired all manner of wardrobes, and dammit if it's not one of the best musicals of the past 30 years. There are songs in James... but nothing remotely as earwormy as even the least of Nightmare's tracks. In fact, watching James... for the first time recently, I kind of resented that they would even try including songs at all. It's not a musical, and so they feel a bit half-assed in their insertion.
I dig Nightmare for the scale of the production...it spans multiple realities and intones so many more (I would love a sequel that visited some of the other holiday lands). It's a visual feast in an exceptionally playful reality with so much to look at in its surreal designs that it can't help but inspire, delight and awe. James... feels like a pitiable younger brother in comparison. It's extended drudgery of an opening live action sequence is at once curious and off putting. It doesn't feel natural at all and it's not friendly or welcoming to the viewer in the slightest. Once James escapes into clay-mation land, hanging with the bug people, one has to wonder if the poor boy has hit his head and is bleeding out on a rock somewhere, dreaming all this. In the end it proves it's not a dream and it's all the more confounding for it. It's a much smaller reality than Selick's other works, though still full of invention and creative design, but it's more tedious than exciting as a story.
Coraline takes Gaiman's pre-teen reader and brings it popping to life, taking whatever liberties it sees fit to be as movement oriented as it can be. As a character I find Coraline more striking than any of Selick's other designs. The blue hair, yellow raincoat and mudders are just a wonderfully iconic visual combination (to the point that a doll with blue hair, and yellow raincoat is quickly identified as Coraline). There's a cleverness to Coraline, in the characters, in the story, in the realities, that is hard to turn away from. The individual pieces are all so eccentric, in performance, personality and visual design, and Selick doesn't shy away from being cheeky at all (with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders playing a pair of aged, reclusive former burlesque performer) which makes the production so much livelier that it feels like anything could happen. Even in the creepy factor, most animation of the past 30 years doesn't have anything as startling as people with buttons for eyes...the opening sequence where a doll is unstitched, restuffed, and resewn, is mildly upsetting (the stitch ripper on the mouth is only a few seconds in!).
Wendell & Wild has a lot going on. It starts with parental death and childhood trauma in its first five minutes, but also has a cracking "afro-punk" soundtrack including X-Ray Spex, Death, the Specials and TV on the Radio. The film is dealing a LOT with demons (metaphorical ones, yes, but I mean here literal demons), but they’re not very nefarious, nor are they very bright or all that threatening, but it’s amazing that all this underworld talk is paired up with the setting of a Catholic school, complete with James Hong’s delightfully scheming headmaster, Father Level Bests, and his old biddy servant nuns (“the penguins” he calls them). That our protagonist, Kat (Lyric Ross), has “the mark”, and develops powers as a “Hellmaiden” as also does the kindly nun, Sister Helly (Angela Bassett) is just mind boggling in the who Catholic context. In almost any other film, we’d be sitting with that dichotomy, but there’s no time to think too much about it here. The Hellmaiden thing is sort of a spoof of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, but again, the film doesn’t have enough time to linger on it. There’s a whole warning about the nefariousness and rot on society that is the prison-industrial complex to get through… and murder, and Kat learning to trust other people (including her new trans friend Raul), and herself again. It's quite a bit diffrent aesthetically, with Selick messing around more with flatter, more 2-dimensional visual constructs, and scaling back the cleanliness of animation to try and escape any uncanny CGI valley comparisons.
I would love Peele and Selick to team up again, maybe on something even more adult, more in Peele's wheelhouse. Maybe a proper stop-motion 3D horror film (still need to see Mad God), as it seems like Selick's interests are evolving to wanting to do something more adult in the format he's dedicated his life to.
If I were to rank these, the difficulty comes in the top two for me, which is whether Coraline is the better film than Nightmare. I don't even know which I enjoy more. I've seen Nightmare enough times now that the familiarity doesn't hold my attention as strongly, which I find Coraline has maybe one or two small 3-5 minute sags in it. I would like it to be just a little tighter. Nightmare is kind of a phenomenon for a reason, and it's still an incredible viewing experience in spite of the phenomenon, and I think that may be why it gets the edge at top spot, but I don't feel good about it.
Next is easily Wendell & Wild. It doesn't quite hold up as solidly as a story as Nightmare or Coraline but it's never dull either. Only seeing it the once so far, I wonder how it will withstand multiple viewings, whether it appreciates with knowing where it all goes, or if part of the initial charm is watching it work to sew all its disparate threads together. James and the Giant Peach is not terrible, but easily the weakest of Selick's work (outside of Monkeybone). It had its charms but it seems more spartan than the rich worlds Selick otherwise provides.
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