Henry Selick

Jack Skellington is bored, and Henry Selick gives that feeling proper attention. In The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a holiday takeover grows out of a creature wanting a change. Selick’s feature debut, made from Tim Burton’s story, finds much of its pleasure in letting us spend time with its peculiar inhabitants. We were unexpectedly touched by Jack’s restlessness, because Selick takes it seriously amid the scares and jokes. There is no anxious effort to soften every odd face for a family audience.

Danny Elfman’s songs give Jack a persuasive voice, while Selick’s animation gives the surrounding creatures individual personalities worth watching. The scares and gags belong together, and Selick does not interrupt one to explain away the other. The weakness is how little the story develops its opening idea. That leaves the film dependent on how much company we want to keep with these creatures, which for us is enough for a warm recommendation.

Literary adaptation gave him room to develop the technique in James and the Giant Peach (1996), from Roald Dahl. The mixed live action and stop-motion of Monkeybone (2001) took him elsewhere, before Coraline (2009) returned him to a novel, this time Neil Gaiman’s. On Coraline, he also wrote the screenplay, with innovations in facial animation and 3D stop-motion expanding the technical possibilities. Co-writing Wendell & Wild (2022) with Jordan Peele continued his work in dark fantasy, with stop-motion still central to his filmmaking.

Selick values the physical imperfections of stop-motion, a preference that makes sense for a director so interested in peculiar creatures. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, even a calculated joke leaves us with individual details in the animation worth noticing. The care spent on Jack matters most: his unhappiness gets proper attention when it could have served simply as an excuse to set the plot going. Start with The Nightmare Before Christmas, unless a family fantasy needs to be entirely comforting.