Henry Selick

Henry Selick was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He is an award winning American Stop Motion director, producer and writer. He was very young when his interest in art flourished. He would sit in the kitchen and make elaborate stories of his ‘other family’ and ‘other life’ in Africa to his mother. He would make detailed and intricate drawings of animals and make a whole new universe that his mother almost believed in sometimes. He has a certain knack for unusual and scary animation.

As a kid, he was captivated by Charles Addams cartoons, the original ‘The Twilight Zone’, and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. He made it big in his high school wrestling team and excelled in Physics. He studied science at Rutgers University and then went to Syracuse University to study art. He studied Experimental Animation at the California Institute of Arts under the guidance of Jules Engel. Before finishing school, he made two movies, ‘Phases’ and “Tube Tales”, both of which were selected for the Student Academy Award.

He initially started as an ‘in-betweener’ in Walt Disney Studios and helped in “Pete’s Dragon” and “The Little One”. Later he worked fully with Glen Keane in “Fox and The Hound”. His independent feature was the animation short film, ‘Seepage’. He used the grant he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. The movie received an Annie Award for his direction.

He made famous commercials like the award winning ‘Ritz crackers’, where the crackers are skating down the peanut butter fountain and flying to the moon in search of cheese. He made nine Pillsbury Doughboy remodelings in a year. He won the National AFI contest and made a video for the band ‘Fishbone’ called “Party at Ground Zero”. The six-minute video was awarded the Billboard Magazine Award for the Best Art Direction and Best Set Decoration. He has an uncanny ability to communicate with woodland creatures and that helps him in making realistic setups for movies he makes. This even came in handy when he impressed his wife Heather Ryan by summoning a dragonfly and making it sit on his finger.

In 1990, he made the MTV original series, “Slow Bob in Lower Dimensions”. The movie won first place in the Ottawa Animation Festival and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. Tim Burton, his classmate from CalArts, made him direct the 1993 feature, “The Nightmare before Christmas”. It became an instant hit and Selick received an Annie award for creative supervision. The movie was later remade into a 3D feature and the movie was an instant Christmas favourite. In 1996, “Jack and the Giant Peach” was a stop motion with computer graphics and stylized live action sequences he made. The movie was based on the Roald Dahl children’s classic.

Selick joined the Canadian LAIKA animation company. He directed the first computer generated animation film, ‘Moongirl’ (2005). He also made the 2009 stop motion animation, ‘Coraline’. In 2010, he signed a long term contract with Pixar and Walt Disney Company; technically he went back to where he started. Selick has been in talks as of 3rd November, 2015, with comedians Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key of the famous sit-com “Key and Peele”, developing a new animation flick, “Wendell and the Wild”. Henry has two kids with wife Heather called Harry and George. When he is not out creating a whole intricate different world of cinema, he likes to surf, bike and drink artisan and gourmet beer.