Henry Selick Heads To Pixar

We had heard about this a few weeks ago but decided not to report it, probably because at the time it sounded awfully conjecture-y, but Variety has gone and broke it: Henry Selick, the director whose visual wizardry brought us “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and last year’s beguiling “Coraline,” is headed to Pixar, to produce stop motion animated features for the company.

This is a pretty big deal. Pixar, after all, is the company that produced the first completely computer generated film (“Toy Story”), so for them to expand their palette to include the particularly time consuming and dusty process of stop motion animation (which, admittedly, seems to be on the rebound, what with “Coraline” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” last year) is fascinating. The Variety article makes mention that Selick will have complete access to the peerless Pixar “brain trust” (composed of big time directors like John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Pete Docter) in the development of his films. Selick left the Porland-based Laika, the animation house owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, shortly after the release of “Coraline” last year. Selick had been their supervising director since 2004.

Just last night a non-movie friend was asking us why Joss Whedon had co-written the first “Toy Story” and not the second one. And the easiest explanation was that, after the studio interference involved in the first film (particularly from Jeffrey Katzenberg, who kept urging Lasseter to make it “edgier”), that the studio closed itself off, forging a kind of hermetically sealed creative environment that was (and is) very hard to penetrate. The studio’s last big “hire” was Brad Bird, a few years before “The Incredibles.” Moreover, Selick isn’t entirely a stranger, having been a classmate of Lasseter’s at CalArts keeping the “in the family” vibe of the studio intact.

But this injection of fresh blood should do a lot of good for the company. Their forthcoming slate of films seems particularly uninspired and someone of Selick’s stature could definitely right the good ship Pixar back into creatively fertile waters. From technical standpoint, the idea of antiquated animation techniques and cutting edge technology coming together is an exciting one indeed. The hiriing of Selick continues Pixar’s overall recent growth with the addition of a satellite campus in Canada (for training and shorts) and the massive Pixar overlays coming to many of the Disney Parks worldwide (look for Carsland, a new, elaborately themed area of Disney’s California Adventure, to open along with “Cars 2” next summer).