Life on Mars

LETS PLAY A GAME. It’s called: Who directed it TIM BURTON or HENRY SELICK

We’ll start with the 2009 Laika film Coraline based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Do you know who directed it? Burton or Selick?

Did you guess yet?

If you guessed Henry Selick, you would be correct. Tim Burton actually had absolutely nothing to do with Coraline at all in anyway ever. Reminder: Tim Burton has NOTHING to do with Coraline. At all. But that was an easy one. Let’s go to the Walt Disney Pictures adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, James and the Giant Peach next.

Think you got it? Are you sure? Better double check…

Oh, look. It’s Henry Selick again! Tim Burton actually interacted with this project, though only as a producer. Bet that was tricky… Next one! Let’s go to the Disney/Touchstone Pictures film Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Have you guessed it correctly? Have you really?

Yep that’s right. Even Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was directed by Henry Selick. Though Burton wrote the poem and created the characters in which Nightmare was based he didn’t have much interaction with the project beyond that. At the time he had already signed off to direct the film Batman Returns and did not want to be involved with the “painstakingly slow process of stop-motion animation.”