Mar 1

Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. A big part of his beat is the Pop Culture page, which covers manga, anime and video games.  You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.

He also writes about movies. Here is his interview with stop-motion animator Henry Selick, whose film “Coraline” is a nominee for best animated feature in the Academy Awards to be presented on March 7:

When the nominees for best animated feature film are read out at the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood next month, there will be one computer-graphic animated film (Up), two traditional 2-D animated films (The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells) and two stop-motion films (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline).

“I feel very lucky to have lived long enough to still be making films in this era,” Coraline director Henry Selick told The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo last week. His two previous features, Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996) came out before the Oscars introduced an animated feature category in 2001.

Coraline has already won several other prizes, including an Annie animation award for Japanese production designer Tadahiro Uesugi.

Coraline, based on a novel by Neil Gaiman, is the story of a young girl who discovers a secret passage to an alternate universe where all the things that annoy her in the real world have been changed. But like a gingerbread house in a fairy tale, this seemingly delightful place turns out to be a trap from which she must escape.

Read the rest of the article here.


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