HENRY SELICK

I learned my lesson that in the live-action world, you have to earn the support of people over a very, very long time. And in animation, I already have the support.

As a director, I'm not the one animating every frame, every shot. I'm moving around like a surgeon on rounds, or a farmer checking in on all the plants being grown, pruning and adjusting. For me, it's a very exciting job.

If you're drawing humans, it can be detrimental to be too naturalistic, which is like animating little corpses.

There's very few people who want to just make beautiful films that make money, when they can make films that make huge money.

Very few people have made the transition from animation to live-action; I'm certainly not one.

I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.

Making 'Coraline' was one of the great filmmaking experiences of my life.

No one's ever going to make a PG-13 animated film unless David Fincher executive produces it and puts it out on Netflix, and then if it's a success everyone will change.

We are suffering from a glut of too many 3-D movies and not enough screens.

Nobody does animation better than Disney; it's just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

Morals always sound like cliches, but usually cliches are based on things that are ultimate truths. Be grateful for what you have; appreciate what's right there in front of you.

Kids love to be scared; we all do. But there's a difference between leaving them hanging out there, with their fears, and then bringing them safely home. Kids love it when someone like them stands up against real evil, something really horrendous and frightening, and win.

Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.

I think that one of the things that I can do is I seem to have the ability to zoom in super tight for very small details, but then jump back for sort of that big picture perspective. And I think that ultimately, that's one of my strengths, because you have - every detail matters.

People are very harsh critics of animated humans.

Unless you have kids, you actually have no idea what kids are watching on TV these days.

People are always telling me that boys won't go to girls' movies and vice versa. It's not true.

While I was making 'Coraline' I barely got to see any films at all, so I've got a lot of catching up to do.

There's always kids who become stop motion animators. I get stuff all the time. They put it on YouTube. It's exciting to see.

Underneath this tired, middle-aged exterior, I'm an 11 year old kid.

I'm meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It's more my problem than Hollywood's. I'm not attuned to Hollywood.

Any type of animation, it could be really super crude or very sophisticated, it doesn't mean anything if we don't make this point in this shot, this one here and this one here. There's the saying, 'One shot, one thought.' It's pretty much a true way to go.

What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark - not too dark - fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that's really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.

I have more faith in doing something creative for a cable station or something like Yahoo or Google or Amazon. What Netflix did with 'House of Cards' and David Fincher was brilliant. That is inspiring to me. I think there is more chance for creativity in animation, it just hasn't happened there yet.