Henry Selick Quotes

I thought boxes were the best toy. When my parents got a new car, I ran to my mother and said, 'Did it come in a box?'

Growing up, I had a very vivid imagination and Leonardo was like my best imaginary friend that I spoke to. When things were tough, or I was scared in an unsafe environment, I always imagined that the Ninja Turtles would come to the rescue.

One of my favorites is one called 'Rory's Radio' that I wrote about my brother Jeff's best friend growing up - his name was Rory Dunigan. I dedicated my first record to my brother, who got killed in a car accident in 1999, and I really didn't have any songs on the first album about him, nothing on a personal note.

My very best friend died in a car accident when I was 16 years old. That was the hardest blow emotionally that I have ever had to endure. Suddenly, you realize tomorrow might not come. Now I live by the motto, 'Today is what I have.'

'Mosaic' is about what we see and what we don't see. I learned how people can develop other senses to compensate for a missing one when I was a child. My best friend, Carol, who is profoundly deaf, saved me from an approaching car that she 'heard' when I didn't.

I had the whole 'Ghostbusters' toy set with the firehouse and the car and everything. Sometimes I'd use my grandpa's camera and make little stop-motion cartoons with those toys - I was definitely a weird kid.

One of my first videos on VHS, unknowingly at the time, was a stop-motion of a cup moving across a countertop on its own. I was pretending that I was performing some kind of magic trick. It was my way of doing effects without understanding how to edit.

My best friend died in a high-speed chase.

It took me five years to make 'Kubo and the Two Strings.'

Very few people view stop motion the way we do. We really try to use it - and animation generally - as a powerful visual medium by which you can tell virtually any kind of story in any genre.

'Robot Chicken' was one of my favorite shows.

I used to wrestle with my stuffed animals.

If you go too small, you can't get the performance you need out of the small little parts. And if you go too big, the puppet gets difficult to move, because it's too heavy, and there's too much material, and it becomes this exercise in just moving these massive parts around. So there is a natural scale that makes sense for stop-motion.

The only kind of people who pursue stop-motion as a career are people who are absolutely in love with the medium.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

I've always said that your attitude is your best friend and your worst enemy.

Typically, with low-budget stop-motion, you can get away with a cartoony style.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I've done with my life, it's Ray Harryhausen... In 'Kubo,' you can see some of his influence throughout.

My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.

Being in the body of an African-American woman, I prefer animation. I get to be everybody. I don't have to always be the white girl's best friend. I can be the princess. I can make an inanimate object come to life. I can be a little boy. I can be anything.

All of the things we learned on 'Coraline' we applied to 'ParaNorman,' and all of the things we learned on 'ParaNorman' and 'Coraline' we applied to 'The Boxtrolls.'

I'm a huge 'Nightmare before Christmas' fan, but that was also Henry Selick. I'm a really big fan of 'Sleepy Hollow.' I love 'Big Fish,' too, which is a bit different. There's a really cool era of early-Burton stuff like 'Ed Wood' that I'm a big fan of.

Stop-motion is sort of the redheaded stepchild of animation. But it's incredibly beautiful.