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With large-scale stop-motion works like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach” under his belt, there’s no question that Henry Selick was an ideal director to decide how Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” would look on screen. Selick isn’t afraid of taking chances, even if it means scrapping one direction for another or taking a "less is more" approach toward his interaction with Gaiman. But when MTV sat down with the celebrated director, we still had to ask: why was filming a stop-motion world in 3D the right choice for “Coraline”?

Simply put, when it came down to turning “Coraline” into a believable, inhabitable world, Selick chose the technology he thought would best energize everything on the screen.

“The story itself -- finding a different world -- I wanted to draw people into that world, too,” Selick told MTV News. “3D was a way to enhance that space, that sense of being drawn in. I didn't want to punch people in the eye, which is actually one fine trick to do with 3D, but I’d rather sucker them into this world.” Read More...

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Making scary stories family-friendly for film is somewhat of a specialty for director Henry Selick. And when it comes to collaborations with creators like Neil Gaiman on “Coraline” or Tim Burton on “The Nightmare Before Christmas” his source material comes steaming with tongue-in-cheek horror tropes ripe for Selick’s particular style of stop-motion animation.

“Some would say it's too scary for kids, or it's not scary enough for adults,” Selick said of “Coraline” in an exclusive interview with MTV News. “Doing it as a stop-motion film would sort of bridge those two audiences in some respects. Stop-motion has its own creeky feel to it. It has a charm, in a sense. You don't know how big that thing is you're looking at, but you know it exists.” Read More...

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