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New Blu-ray release offers improved picture and sound quality but little in the way of additional bonus features.
Riding on the delightfully cobwebbed coat-tails of Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, poor JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH was probably predestined to be a disappointment, for what film could possibly live up to that level [...]

Henry Selick with a stop-motion puppet from CORALINE
Variety reports that Henry Selick (who wrote and directed last year’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion hit CORALINE) has signed a deal to make films for Disney-Pixar. Selick worked for Disney back in the 1990s on TIM BURTON’S A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. The later film [...]

Zoe Saldana is the Wonder Awards choice for Best Actress, in the Best Pic winner, AVATAR.
It’s Sunday, March 7, and everyone is wondering what the winners will be. Well, wonder no more, because here are the official winners of this year’s Cinefantastique Wonder Awards. Oh sure, other people are tuning into the Oscar telecast to [...]

Bruno Coulais’ score for Henry Selick’s 3D-animated film, CORALINE,  is an enchanting enactment for orchestra and choir, which brings to wonderful life the magical environment and story concocted by the brilliant author Neil Gaiman. The music features a perfectly appropriate blending of unusual instruments (mechanical piano, electric bass guitar, jazzy flutes, what sounds like a child’s [...]

As is usual for animated films, CORALINE was completely storyboarded, allowing for a great deal of thought about where the camera should go for each and every one of its approximately 1,500 shots. This careful pre-planning allowed director Henry Selick to come up with some beautiful camera moves (and angles), as well as determine the [...]

Whether you go through the looking  glass, down the rabbit hole, over the rainbow, or into the labyrinth, you are bound to encounter wonders beyond your imagination, sights and sounds that impress the senses and embed themselves upon the brain with all the enchantment of a beautiful dream, but somewhere in our minds we know [...]

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Having launched his career with the weird and intriguing MTV short subject “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions” (the first of what was supposd to be several episodes that, never, alas materialized), Henry Selick followed up by directing one of the most charming fantasy entertainments ever created for the screen, Tim Burton’s THE [...]

Henry Selick’s film of Neil Gaiman’s book ranks alongside the classics of fantasy filmmaking

10 years ago, in February, 1999, Cinefantastique celebrated the 100th anniversary of stop-motion with the publication of a special double issue. At the time, it looked very much like stop-motion might be poised to go the way of the dinosaur, as CGI [...]

CORALINE is the upcoming stop-motion fantasy film from Henry Selick, director of the uber-wonderful Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Selick’s follow-ups, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and MONKEYBONE, have come nowhere near matching that initial blaze of glory; fortunately, this time out he is working from a piece of source material by Neil Gaiman, about [...]

Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS gets another go-round in theatres beginning this week. Last year, the film was digitally enhanced with 3D for its annual Halloween reappearance. Disney puts the film into its El Capitan Theater in Hollywood every year; for 2006, the 3D presentation warranted  other theatres around the country – a tactic being repeated this [...]

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH may be fashioned from a variety of film-making techniques, but there is one intangible element that holds the film together: pure imagination. Springing to life first in the fertile mind of author Roald Dahl and then planted like a seed in the equally fertile mind of stop-mo¬tion director Henry Selick, [...]

Don’t be surprised if, much like the titular fruit, you feel you’ve been cast adrift in this live-action/stop-motion animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s classic. The story of a boy’s fanciful trip to New York City, accom¬panied by the insect inhabitants of a massive peach, seems to have been a victim of an historic [...]