Director: Henry Selick

Henry Selick directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is persistently credited to Tim Burton, who produced and designed it but did not direct. Selick has been gracious about this for thirty years.

James and the Giant Peach and Coraline followed, and Coraline is the fullest statement: a stop-motion children’s film that is authentically unsettling, with button eyes and a mother who is wrong in a way children recognize immediately.

Stop motion at feature length is punishing work, roughly a few seconds of usable footage per animator per week, which explains the gaps between his films.