At the Movies with Governor Tom: James and the Giant Peach and Coraline

I remember when James and the Giant Peach came out. It was the spring of 1996. I was closing in on the end of my sophomore year at Temple University. The first Toy Story had just come out the previous autumn, and that slick new style of CGI three-dimensional animation was beginning its encroachment in earnest on the 2D hand-drawn style. Whoever was in charge of marketing for James must've targeted college students hard. I remember clear as day seeing posters for it at campus bus stops.

It didn't work on me unfortunately. I didn't have much time for movies in those days, what with five or so classes and a part-time job on the side. Finding time to eat and sleep was rocket science enough. I hadn't seen Toy Story at that point either, so I only knew about the new animation by reputation thanks mainly to the attention Toy Story had just gotten at the Oscars. Perhaps I would've been more creative with my time and found a way to see James had I known it was adapted from a book by Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of my favorite childhood books, and directed by Henry Selick who, just before this, had directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I did see on the big screen thank you very much.

As it was, I didn't see James and the Giant Peach. I didn't even rent it, although I did rent Toy Story eventually. No, good ol' James was one of those flicks you always meant to see but somehow never got around to. That's why I say God bless movie theaters like the ArcLight. Not only is the ArcLight a first-run house, it's also home base for the American Film Institute. AFI has screenings there all the time for both new films and old, and oftentimes they have people from the films show up for Q&As.

Today the ArcLight Hollywood had a Henry Selick triple feature: James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. James kicked off at 5 p.m., which meant leaving work much earlier than usual. Hollywood isn't exactly down the street from Burbank. After James was over, they went straight to Coraline, and that was followed by a Q&A with Henry Selick. I could've stayed for Nightmare, but it would've meant spending yet another twelve bucks, plus I'd already been sitting there for too many hours for my numb ass to count. No matter. Like I said, I've seen Nightmare on the big screen. I'd already seen Coraline when it came out earlier this year, but it's so awesome I certainly didn't mind catching it again.

Just barely eighty minutes long, James and the Giant Peach is a pretty straightforward story, as a lot of the best stories are. It takes place in the fifties (when the book was written). Roald Dahl doesn't waste a minute making life a living hell for our young hero. The first scene shows James hanging out on the beach with Mom and Dad. They're an English family. Dad tells him they're planning a hoilday to New York. He shows his boy a New York postcard, which gets James all psyched up. And then out of the blue a rhinoceros (don't ask) comes along and tramples Mom and Dad to death. So just like that, our hero's an orphan. Steven Culp plays Dad, by the way.

Cut from the gorgeous sunny beach of England's south coast to some anonymous and very grim-looking English hamlet. It's not raining, but the weather is nonetheless dominated by a drab grayness which, like the worst colds, never goes away. James is living with his two terrible aunts. Were they Mom's sisters? Dad's sisters? We don't know, and it doesn't matter. They suck. Shit, just look at their names: Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. Like a lot of villains, they have awesome names. And they're played by a couple of Britain's top actresses: Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous fame and Miriam Margolyes. When she did James and the Giant Peach, Miriam Margolyes had just finished making the HBO movie Stalin with Robert Duvall and Maximilian Schell. Man, you talk about doing a complete one-eighty, from a movie as heavy as that to playing a wacky evil aunt in a Roald Dahl adaptation. I saw her on stage here in L.A. in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Miriam's one of those consummate professional actors, ya know? Nothing flashy. You won't hear about her at the Oscars. She just gets the job done and doesn't make a fuss. Joanna Lumley, one of the great comic geniuses in Britain today, did actually make a fuss while they were shooting James and the Giant Peach. More on that below when I get to Henry Selick's Q&A.

I forgot to mention that this first part of the film is live action. The very end is live action as well. The middle eighty percent or so, when James is journeying across the Atlantic on the giant peach, is where we get to the animation. It's not the sleek CGI animation Toy Story had just made famous the year before. Nope, as he'd already demonstrated in spades with The Nightmare Before Christmas, Henry Selick is old school. No, I don't mean the hand-drawn stuff. I'm talking stop-motion. Think Harryhausen.

Back to James, he's so lonely and desperate for companionship, he actually befriends a spider that's spun a web in the window of his prison. I mean, bedroom. No, the spider doesn't talk or anything. Yet. We're still in the live action world. Just because the spider doesn't talk or doesn't (seem to) understand him, though, doesn't stop James from feeling affection for it, or from freaking out when his aunts try to kill it and sweep away the web.

One day, while putzing around outside and avoiding Aunts Spike and Sponge, this guy shows up. By his voice you know it's the guy who was narrating at the beginning. He's just this nameless guy played by Pete Postlethwaite, that tall bony English actor I know you've seen in films and on TV, even if you haven't bothered to learn his name. He just has that unique face coupled with great talent that makes him the quintessential character actor. I mean the guy can do it all: Funny, dramatic, evil. He especially looks evil when he's completely bald. When he keeps his hair, or what's left of it, he looks goofy. Anyway, so Pete plays the narrator as well as this nameless guy who shows up and gives James a container with boiled crocodile tongues. Yes, you read that right: Boiled crocodile tongues. He tells James the tongues are magical but to be careful with them.

Pete takes off, and in no time James spills the tongues all over the place. One of them sinks into the ground at the base of the big tree in the front yard before he can collect it. Yep, you guessed it. Thanks to the magical boiled crocodile tongue, this otherwise barren, dead, and hideous tree starts growing a bright and healthy peach on one of its branches. The peach grows. And grows. And keeps on growing. Before you know it, Spike and Sponge have this peach the size of a small lorry in their front yard. Always ready to take advantage of people, they surround the peach with walls and a gate. They then advertise the bejesus out of it and make people pay a fee to go into the enclosure just to look at the peach. People do pay too. In no time the peach becomes the talk of the British Empire. Folks flock from all over to get a look-see.

One night, really late, long after the tourists have left, James goes and gets his own private look at the peach. He rips out a small hunk of it so he can taste it. And then he falls into it. This is where the film turns into stop-motion animation. Inside the peach he discovers that the boiled crocodile tongue also had a magical effect on some of the local wildlife, including that one spider who'd been living in his window. Miss Spider, as she's conveniently known, is voiced by Susan Sarandon, who affects a vaguely Eastern European/Transylvanian-type accent. Rounding out James's new friends are: Mr. Old Green Grasshopper (Simon Callow), Mr. Centipede (Richard Dreyfuss), Mr. Earthworm (David Thewlis), Mrs. Ladybug (Jane Leeves, a.k.a. Daphne from Frasier), and Mrs. Glowworm (Miriam Margolyes...again!).

Like James, the bugs aren't very happy in this hamlet. They dream of a better place. For his part, James is still dreaming of New York. He goes on and on about it until the bugs are sufficiently interested in going there too. Maybe this giant magical peach can help them get there. Mr. Centipede devises a way to sever it from the branch. Aunt Sponge comes out of the house just as the peach starts rolling down the yard. You'll cheer too as you watch her ugly visage steamrolled under the peach. Before it falls into the ocean, Miss Spider spins a ton of silk around the stem and uses it to link the peach to a flock of seagulls flying by at that particular moment. The seagulls aren't fazed by the silk. They keep heading west while towing the giant peach beneath them.

And that's how James and his new pals cross the Atlantic. They do a great job making the peach their cozy little home. They can hang out on top of it, or along the side on a makeshift wooden path they build. And of course they have awesome aerial views of the ocean in all directions as far as you can see. Of course the journey isn't all peachy. Indeed, they encounter one mishap after another, including a giant robotic shark. My favorite part is when they have to contend with undead skeleton pirates in a sunken galleon. Even that rhino that killed James's parents shows up at one point, barreling through the clouds (again, don't ask).

When they finally reach the skies over Manhattan, it's truly a sight for sore eyes. The peach lands on top of the Empire State Building. The cabbies and pedestrians and everyone else down there notice it. Suffice it to say James has a tough time explaining himself to the crowd that's gathered once he reaches the ground. The kids believe him. The cops? Eh. This is where the film returns to live action. For the most part. He'll need the bugs' help convincing the New Yorkers he's not crazy.

James and the Giant Peach is a sweet film. It's not a masterpiece. It's not as good as The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline, but it's good stuff. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, as I do Coraline. Also stop-motion, Coraline has the bonus of being in 3D. During the break after James and the Giant Peach, the nice folks at the ArcLight provided us with those bulky 3D glasses. Seriously, those things are big, more astronaut visors than glasses. That's right, younglings. Long gone are the days of the paper blue and red glasses. I didn't know until today that movie theaters use different brands of 3D glasses for the same 3D movies. When I saw Coraline earlier this year, I saw it at the AMC in downtown Burbank. The 3D glasses there were much less imposing. They looked like sunglasses actually, the Ray-Bans from Men in Black. What Tom Cruise wore in Risky Business.

Like James and the Giant Peach, Coraline's adapted from a book, only this one's much more recent, a novella written in 2002 by Neil Gaiman. I've yet to read a single word by Neil, but I know him well by reputation. He's the brain behind the Sandman comics, which one of my stepbrothers collected for a time back in the late eighties when it was brand new. His novel Stardust was made into a pretty decent movie a couple years ago. A contributor to other series like Hellblazer and Swamp Thing, the guy's very prolific.

The title character of Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning, is about the same age as James, almost but not quite pubescent. No, her folks don't die, no tragedy befalls her at the outset. What does set the story in motion, however, is still at the expense of her happiness. Like James, she has to leave the world she's ever known, in her case Michigan, for completely new digs in the Pacific Northwest. Her folks decided to move there for their careers. Like James, Coraline's an only child. Her folks work at home, which is nice, but they work all the time. Whenever she tries to get their attention, they don't hide the fact that she's annoying them. Her mom (voiced by Teri Hatcher) can get really nasty. Dad's kind of a nice guy, just aloof. Coraline does make one friend. Sort of. He's this kid about her age named Wyborn. Wybie, for short. Wyborn. I love that name. He's kind of goofy and grates on Coraline, although that doesn't say much, as Coraline seems easily grated. She's almost a teenager, so I suppose she's getting warmed up for being irritable and difficult twenty-four-seven. No, but really, Coraline's awesome. She doesn't take shit from anyone. Anyway, Wybie's family has an interesting backstory that becomes very relevant toward the end.

Wybie lives with his grandmother, landlady of the Pink Palace, the two-story Queen Anne that's been converted into apartments. Coraline and her folks live on the first floor. The second floor and basement are also apartments. More on their occupants in a sec. Wybie's grandma doesn't want him going near that house, for that's the house where her twin sister disappeared when she was a little girl. Wybie comes over to the house now and again anyway. He's a fairly easy going guy who doesn't seem to let rules get in the way. He even pilfers stuff from his grandma's trunk, including this one button-eyed doll he gives to Coraline because it looks just like her. This is the doll we see being sown together during the opening credits by a pair of spindly metallic hands, the owner of which we meet much later.

A black cat with knowing eyes (don't all cats having knowing eyes?) wanders around the grounds. He doesn't seem to belong to anybody, but he does seem keen on keeping those eyes on Coraline. In the basement apartment live two retired actresses named Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, voiced by the terrific British comic duo of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. Up on the second floor is a retired Russian circus performer named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), as tall and bony as the actresses are rotund.

One day, bored out of her skull, Coraline wanders into one of the empty rooms in her apartment and finds a little locked door that's been wallpapered over. She nags Mom to unlock it only to find a brick wall on the other side. Bummed out, Coraline moves on and forgets about it. Until that night, that is, when she wakes up to find a mouse squeaking near her bedroom doorway. She follows it down the hall and into that room with the small door....which now opens onto a passageway. Not missing a beat, Coraline gets on all fours and crawls through.

On the other side is basically the same place. Only it's different. The "other world" is the only name ever applied to it. Her parents are there, only they have buttons for eyes, the same style of black buttons as that doll Wybie gave her at the beginning. If you don't count how creepy they look, her "other" parents are much nicer than her real ones. Other Mom is a great cook. By this point in the story it's clear that whenever Coraline feels any trepidation at all, she gets over it pretty quick. And so it is here. At first she's kind of weirded out by this other world and her other parents and the fact that the black cat can now talk (Keith David), but soon enough it doesn't faze her. She sits down at the table and enjoys Other Mom's great feast. She even stays the night and falls soundly asleep in her other bed. When she wakes up, though, she finds herself back in the real world. No, don't worry, it wasn't all a dream. The threat emanating from the other world is all too real. It's a good thing the cat can talk in the other world, as he's basically the only one there interested in helping Coraline.

Without giving too much away, but as you've no doubt guessed, this other world is not all it's cracked up to be. And Other Mom is not really as nice as all that. Not only is it a very sinister place lorded over by a witch, but it also holds the key (literally and figuratively) to what happened to Wybie's grandmother's twin sister. Coraline uncovers all this after Other Mother kidnaps her real parents. Anyway, great stuff. Do see it if you haven't already.

The Q&A with Henry Selick was moderated by Charles Solomon, a historian specializing in animated films. The first thing he and Henry talked about was Henry's early, pre-Nightmare animation career. In the eighties, when Henry was in his thirties, his first big animation break came when he was hired to do the Pillsbury Dough Boy commercials. That's kind of awesome because I remember those commercials quite fondly. I was a youngin' back then. Henry sounded like he kind of enjoyed that job. And the Dough Boy was animated in stop-motion style, which has always been his preference. One thing he said that cracked me up was that he and his crew had to make "twenty different facial expressions for the Pillsbury Dough Boy, all of them happy." Like a lot of directors, Henry tends to surround himself with the same crew and support staff from project to project. Once you have a team you're comfortable with and with whom you've established a solid rapport, why mess that up, right? The crew he works with now is the same crew he's been working with since his Dough Boy days. That's pretty cool, and no doubt why he's grateful to the Pillsbury Company for giving him that opportunity. It's helped his career in more ways than one.

So why does Henry love stop-motion so much? Well, it's for the same reason that any stop-motion animator would prefer that style. One word: Harryhausen. If you haven't heard of Ray Harryhausen, even if you're not much of an animation buff, well, good for you! That would be quite an accomplishment. Even if you don't know the name, you must've heard of some of his stuff: Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, One Million Years B.C., Clash of the Titans, a couple other Sinbad films. Seriously, it's no exaggeration to say Harryhausen is a god in the animation world. Professional animators today, even if they're not into stop-motion, usually cite Harryhausen as an influence. I myself have had the good fortune of seeing him in person. The Egyptian Theatre, one of the venues for the nonprofit American Cinemateque, held a retrospective of his career a few years ago coinciding with the release of a new book about his animation. I attended one of the screenings, Jason and the Argonauts, which was followed by a Q&A and book signing with Ray. Pretty awesome. And I have to say the old coot is remarkably cogent and together for someone his age.

Ray Harryhausen wasn't just an influence on Henry Selick, he was THE influence. This is when Henry mentioned he was from New Jersey. That's cool. I did most of my growing up in Jersey also. Only, Henry's from Glen Ridge, which is in the northeastern part of the Garden State, just outside New York. I grew up in Mount Holly, which is in the southwestern part of the state (South Jersey as they say), just outside Philly. When Henry was six or so, Mom took him to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. It scared the shit out of him. Henry reiterated that he had no idea that's what he wanted to do at that point. He was only six, don't forget. Indeed, that film gave him nightmares for years, he said. As the years went by, though, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad scared him less and impressed him more. By the time he was in high school, he knew stop-motion was where his heart belonged. Wouldn't it be cool if he could whip up stop-motion movies that had the same effect on kids that Sinbad had on him? I'm a little old for animated kids' films to give me nightmares, but if I were in elementary school and saw a movie like Coraline, I could imagine being pretty creeped out. It definitely has a thick edge of darkness and danger to it, perhaps more than anything Henry's done at this point. Henry's met Harryhausen a couple times and has hung out with him at animation festivals.

Another influence on Henry has been Terry Gilliam, one of the Monty Python troupe and the only Python alum who's gone on to direct. It was cool hearing how much Henry admires him. One of Terry's earlier films, Time Bandits, was one of my favorite films growing up in the eighties. I remember seeing The Adventures of Baron Munchausen on cable while living with my mom in North Carolina in the late eighties. Fisher King, which Terry did in the early nineties, is another terrific film. And then of course there's Brazil, his masterpiece. He'll probably never top that. Admittedly it can be hit and miss with Terry. He's done great stuff, but he's also done a lot of forgettable stuff. I saw that movie The Brothers Grimm he did a few years ago with Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, and Lena Headey. In fact I saw it in the Cinerama Dome, but I remember virtually nothing about it. Except Lena Headey. This was shortly before she signed up to play Sarah Connor in the short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. I haven't seen Tideland, but if the critics and their cousins are to be believed, seeing it would be hazardous to my health. But ya know, that's kind of why you've gotta admire Terry. The man takes risks even though he doesn't really need to at this point in his career. He's pushing seventy. Why not just sit back and be complacent with mainstream commercial work? From what I hear, he was offered the chance to direct the first Harry Potter film. I think he wanted to, but Warners thought his vision for it was too out there. The thing about taking risks and doing things your own way: If you fail, you do so spectacularly, but if you succeed, ditto. Life's too short otherwise.

I have to say it's kind of interesting that Henry was influenced by Terry Gilliam. By the time Terry started making films, Henry was already in his thirties. Nonetheless, Brazil and Munchausen were big influences on him. And yes, Henry has gotten to meet and hang out with Terry. One episode Henry related was when he and Terry got drunk at London's Groucho Club. It's this private club across the street from the house where Groucho Marx lived. London law says you can't drink after a certain time, but private clubs provide a loophole. Anyway, Henry and Terry got drunk there. If Terry's brain is as wild as his films suggest, he's no doubt a fun guy to drink with.

It was inevitable that Charles would ask Henry about his relationship with Tim Burton, who produced both The Nightmare Before Christmas as well as James and the Giant Peach. Henry's known Tim since the early eighties, before the Pillsbury Dough Boy gig, when they were both cutting their teeth at the bottom of Disney's totem pole. Tim already had the idea for Nightmare, but he couldn't sell it to anyone because he didn't have the clout. So he shelved it. Fast forward a good ten years or so. Now Tim's pitch worked, not because he modified the script or anything, but because he was now, ya know, THE Tim Burton, director of Beetlejuice, two Batman movies, Edward Scissorhands, all that stuff.

Working together as long as they have, it's inevitable they'd have creative differences now and again. While they were able to get through James and the Giant Peach without much drama, that wasn't the case a couple years earlier with Nightmare. The way it worked was, Henry would shoot a scene, and then show it to Tim. The production was in Burbank, but Tim was up in the Bay area. I'm not sure if that's where he lived at the time or what. I think he lives in London now with Helena Bonham Carter. Anyways, so he'd show the dailies to Tim up north, and Tim would always approve them. Henry said Tim approved everything all the way up to the end. When it came time to shoot the showdown between Jack and Oogie Boogie, though, everything stopped getting approved. People were laid off until eventually it was just Henry and one other person working on the film. Man, that's crazy. I wish he'd gone more into that in terms of what bug had suddenly crawled up Tim Burton's ass. Henry eventually said fuck it and went ahead with shooting the scene the way he wanted to, and behind Tim's back. Tim didn't find out about it until Disney approved the final cut. And apparently Tim never made a stink about it or confronted Henry. I have to say, as it was Tim's pet project, it's kind of bizarre the production would end that way, although it does make it a lot more fun to watch now that I know the drama behind the drama. I mean I know all movie sets can be hectic and that producers hire and fire as a matter of course. It's a brutal business. Still, everything had been going perfectly until the end. Why did Tim try to screw it up and for no reason that anyone, not the director, not the studio, could discern?

It's all good, though. Henry and Tim are still tight. In fact, Henry said there's this guy in Jersey who thinks his mom is Tim Burton's mom. Henry's mom has been running the same consignment shop in North Jersey for over thirty years now. She puts the posters from all her boy's movies on the shop walls. Well, she's got this one regular who is absolutely convinced she's Tim's mom. And nothing she can say will dissuade him otherwise.

I have to admit I've always thought actors took on animation work because it meant they didn't have to get all dolled up and dressed up and do all the traveling and so forth. According to Henry, actors also think that. That is, actors who've never done animation. Henry said it never fails. On each and every film, he has some animation newbies who think it's all going to be a breeze. And then comes the inevitable disillusionment. For the most part, they get over it. They are getting paid quite handsomely to sit in a temperature-controlled studio, after all, but sometimes it can get hairy. One anecdote he shared from James and the Giant Peach concerned the drama queen Joanna Lumley from Ab Fab. As I mentioned above, she played Aunt Spiker, one of James's two evil aunts. Well, apparently she was kind of evil even when the cameras weren't rolling. While they were preparing to shoot this one scene, Henry was using a puppet to show Joanna what he wanted her to do. Apparently that's part of his M.O., directing people with puppets. At this point Joanna was grouchy about all the work involved, more than she'd anticipated, even though she was only in a handful of scenes in the first part of the film. So when Henry tried telling her what to do through a puppet, she finally blew up at him with: "I'm not one of your horrible puppets!"

It doesn't seem like he had much drama making Coraline. Dakota Fanning signed up right away, a good two years or so before the production actually started. Terri Hatcher landed the role only after a ton of other actresses were considered. Keith David brought his own style to voicing the cat. Henry didn't have to do much directing with him, although he did say he tried to edge Keith away from his gargoyle voice and more toward a sing-song voice. It worked great. Keith took the sing-song direction and ran with it, but he didn't overdo it. When Henry cast Ian McShane to play Mr. Bobinksy, he specifically didn't want him using his Deadwood voice. I'm not sure why Ian would've done that. Mr. Bobinsky's from Russia. It would've been awfully weird if Bobinsky had sounded like Al Swearengen. Maybe it's because Deadwood was popular at the time. Whatever the case, and however Ian McShane was planning to voice the character, Henry had to tell him to learn a Russian accent. Oops, I wonder if Ian was ready for that. If there was any drama surrounding that bit of extra work, Henry didn't mention it, but it does seem like yet another example of an actor getting more than they bargained for. As for how Henry landed Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, that's thanks to Neil Gaiman. I have to admit casting them was a masterstroke. It makes Coraline relevant not only to American audiences, but to the legions of fans Dawn and Jennifer have in the UK.

Henry went out of his way to say he's not anti-CGI. He's a big fan of the stuff Pixar and Dreamworks churn out. It's just that stop-motion is what he does best. He did admit to using CGI now and then. He guesstimated that he uses it about five percent of the time, to edit out things like wires and so on, and seams in the puppets. For Coraline, which is the first ever stop-motion film made for 3D (The Nightmare Before Christmas was only 3Ded in post production), he came up with literally hundreds of combinations of eye and mouth expressions for his characters, especially for Coraline. It paid off. Coraline's expressions are one of my favorite things about the film. Same with her dad. And the cat. Henry would've loved to keep the seams between the upper and lower halves of the faces, but he chose not to. He didn't say why. Was it the studio's call? Could be. At any rate it's immaterial to me. Coraline's such an engrossing story, I'm not sure I would've noticed the seams.