Blank Check with Griffin & David - Coraline with J.D. Amato

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

The ultimate connoisseur of context, the guru of camera gear - our friend JD Amato makes his triumphant return to the main feed to walk us through the magic and genius of Henry Selick’s masterpiece CORALINE. For listeners who never had the chance to catch this film in its original 3D release, we attempt to describe Selick’s absolute mastery of the form. We go long on the history of Laika studios, from Will Vinton’s California raisins, to the ultimate “nepo baby” Travis Knight’s (aka “Chilly T”) ascension to the throne. Plus - JD discovers a tiny door in our new recording studio… Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com or at teepublic.com/stores/blank-check

How can you walk away from something and then come towards it? Walk around the podcast. Small podcast. See, this is what I did. Is JD, our guest, who I haven't introduced yet. No. False. Suggested a cat quote for me to open with.

And I very quickly punted the responsibility of impersonating Keith David to you. I can't do it. It's impossible. But I just tried to give it a deep voice. If anyone else could do it. Then he'd be out of a job or whatever. He'd be down two homes. Right.

Yeah. I don't know how many homes Keith David has. Number of homes. I'm Googling it. Look it up? Yep. Not seeing an answer to that. Weird that I can't just look that up.

Apparently he's been in more than 300 movies, though. Is there anyone who that works for, who you can just Google number of homes? Mitt Romney. Okay. Remember when that was the thing with Mitt Romney? It was like, he has nine homes or whatever. He's so rich.

You know how there are all those websites that have completely false Celebrity Network listings? There should be a similar sort of celebrity real estate numbers. Yeah, how many homes they got. And it doesn't have to have any connection to reality. I like celebrity net worth because it's like if I was asked how much

a celebrity is worth. That's what it always feels like to me. Like, I don't know, five million dollars? It's just like someone's just kind of like thinking about it for five seconds. It's also funny, I feel like the last time I checked me, it was like $150,000 and I'm like, how come I'm the only one who doesn't have an inflated? I think there should be a sibling site to that.

Sure. Where it just guesstimates how happy they are. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I will say that when I googled your net worth, it says various things such as that you are a Pisces. True. I'm cussed, but you're a Pisces. Okay. That you're American. That you are a Pisces. True. I'm cussed, but you're a Pisces. That you're

American. That you're white. Religion believes in God. Nothing listed there. Pretty much the opposite. I have a religion and I'm not sure I believe in God. Residence, and I just like this. This is the only thing I want to read. He lives in an unknown fashion in New York

City, New York. I just like the weird AI generated descriptions. He lives in an unknown fashion in New York City, New York. I just like the weird AI generated descriptions. He lives in an unknown fashion. I mean... He's in New York. That's all we can say. Friends of Griffin. House, apartment, boat. We can all say it's unknown. It's dead on.

Zach Cherry, friend of the podcast, a future guest, I'll say that. We looked up his celebrity net worth or his AI-generated biography on some site like that, and there was the best line I've ever seen on one of these, which is, he is very funny. He is always making jokes.

He is always making jokes. They're getting it right. Zach Cherry, very funny. Griffin lives in unknown fashion. Zach Cherry of Scorpio. Amazing. Sam Rogal, another friend of the podcast,

past and future guest, has said to me, sometimes at just random moments in the day, I stop and think, how is Griffin existing at this moment? Yes, the stress of being your friend. What do you do on a day-to-day basis? What do you have in your oven?

What do you store in there? Oh, a lot of things. I bet it's like toys. But not like, right, yeah, not oven things. Shoes, toys, like stuff. I have a proper place for the shoes, but yeah, toys and books, basically. Some paperwork.

You know, my social security card, birth certificate. He does it so if anyone comes knocking, he can just burn it all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's smart. Hey, everybody. Mm-hmm.

This is a podcast called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks

to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, and sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce. Baby. Mm-hmm. This is a miniseries on the films of Henry Selick. It is called Ben Hosley's The Podmare Before Casmus. Oh, man.

I'm taking credit for this miniseries. Yeah, you're the producer. Producers always should be listed above the title. Producers always get above the title credit. That's how film works. And the director is forgotten. It works. And this podcast has a director,

and we don't talk about him. We don't talk about him ever. Our guest today, returning to the main feed, returning to the public, who's been demanding, to talk Coraline, the best use of 3D in the history of cinema.

I'll say it. I mean, it's my favorite use of 3d in the history of cinema i'll say it i mean it's my favorite use of 3d in the history i don't think a 3d that's my griff is trying to revive a non-argument from years ago i can't even remember what episode this is like the maybe like this is one of the star wars episodes i think it is the star wars yes that sounds right yeah we were probably discussing technology yeah you know movie pioneering j. Amato is here to talk horror. Hello. It's so good to be back. Hi, J.D. It's nice to have you back.

Welcome back. There was a couple on the books that went off the books because of busyness stuff. So it's been a minute. Wait, wait. What was on the books? Oh, well, you were supposed to be

on Evil Dead 2 at one point. Is that what you were referring to? And I think there's another one I'm forgetting. There's another one. I don't remember what. But it's been a minute. And there's your fabled April Fool's Day episode, which we'll never have.

Which we'll never have. It's done. And that's your decision, by the way, to be clear. Yeah, I mean. It was an idea. It gestated. You explored it, and you kind of put it away, and we supported you.

Yeah, well, also COVID didn't. Well, COVID and stuff like that. And it's like the enthusiasm. It was something that would have. It was a cute idea. It would have made sense in 2019 or whatever. It would be ridiculous for us to do it now it would be bad yeah no one would be but i also don't know if we should say what it is no we shouldn't no we shouldn't ever suddenly feel like but like yes no no i i like it was from like a looser junkier time in the podcast too yes it

was kind of like i don't know could we do some stupid thing? Exactly. I don't think it would fit now. JD, am I allowed to say that you're kind of like a Michael Clayton of TV shows? Okay, that's interesting. Describe. Well, you know who Michael Clayton is from the film Michael Clayton,

George Clooney. Yes. He's like a fixer. Right. It's like he's on staff and everyone's like, oh, he's a lawyer? And they're like,

well, he is a lawyer. Like, he passed the bar. Well, I'm not even saying that everyone's like, oh, he's a lawyer. And they're like, well, he is a lawyer. Like he passed the bar. Well, I'm not even saying that thing. Like the opening scene of Michael Clayton is like Dennis O'Hare calling Michael Clayton at three o'clock in the morning. And Michael Clayton is like, fuck, OK, this is my number one priority now. Yes. I got to solve this.

Yeah. And you have a lot of jobs that will come up very last minute. Yes. And that then become all consuming for a couple of months. Yeah. Some of them are publicly known. Some of them last minute. Yes. And that then become all consuming for a couple of months. Yeah. Some of them are publicly known. Some of them are not. Yeah.

But so a couple of times over the last couple of years, we've like had an episode on the books. Yes. And then we're not trying to withhold JD from the public. JD is not hiding. But sometimes logistically, it becomes impossible. Yeah, it's been. I mean, there's been so many ups and downs of career stuff, COVID stuff, all of that things. Which is weird because the entertainment industry has never

been better. It's, it's the most comfortable, calm and stable it's ever been. Well, the hard thing is, is that you're the pod. Well, I'll say this. It has been so much fun to watch the podcast continue to grow and evolve and become such a big thing. We were talking earlier about, when I first did the podcast, we were in a basement of a bar talking about Star Wars. Well, you're conflating two things. Yeah, the basement of the bar was where he did his Chris Gethard show. Oh, I guess.

Oh, yes. We were in a broom closet. You were in a broom closet. It was the four of us. That's true. That was the first time David and I ever did a podcast together was him subbing in for Riley Solner on the episode you did. Right.

Yeah. But anyways, the point being now, it's been so fun to see how, you know, how many fans and how much people love this show to the point where, no joke, I've been in meetings. Like meetings with people who are big people in the industry and they'll be like, I'm a big blankie. I'm a huge fan of...

And they'll want to talk to me about Speed Racer or something. Truly, I feel like I get... To be fair, that meeting was with Popper Racer, right? Yes. It was with Popper Racer. Is it Popper or Pops? I can't remember. Not John Goodman.

No, Pops. It's been so fun to see all that stuff happen but actually it was with royalton because they were trying to get him to sign on the dot oh yeah sure royalton yeah royalton they're trying to launch a streaming service royalton wants workflow help with uh how they're producing stuff so i got pulled i don't know if i ever shared this anecdote on mike before, and maybe I'll keep it anonymous, but a friend of the show who works in television had a meeting with development execs. Yeah. And they were noting him on something that he thought was stupid.

And he pushed back by saying, you know, on a recent episode of Blank Check, Griffin and David were citing this other movie as an example of a story getting away with not having to do that and actually working out better. And the exec went, huh, Blank Check said that? Interesting. And backed off the note. Oh, my gosh. You guys are note busters? That's great. That's maybe the most satisfying thing I've heard about our podcast accomplishing is killing bad exec notes.

I think that's great. I heard a similar story, and i won't reveal the source but there was you know someone who was facing kind of a similar situation and the executive was just like i think that this is the scene it's just too dry and the person pushed back and they were were like, but producer Ben... Yeah. This is ridiculous. ...loves wet stuff, and I just really think we need to keep this scene

moist as hell. Why is this scene about dry, law-abiding citizens? Yeah. Wet crime! All right. It's nice having you back, J.D. Yes.

It's nice to be here. This is one of those episodes that was sort of just pinned of, obviously, Selick will happen eventually, if Wendell and Wilde ever comes out, and J.D. will do Coraline. Have you seen Wendell and Wilde yet? I have not seen Wendell and Wilde yet. It isn't available to see. Oh, is it?

I just saw it this week. At the time we're recording, it will go up on Netflix tonight. Oh, like, right, it's going up on Netflix. Yes, there's been an unpublicized Oscar-qualifying theatrical run. Oh, I didn right. It's going up on Netflix. Yes. There's been an unpublicized Oscar qualifying theatrical run. Oh, I didn't know that. Barely.

And then it's going up on Netflix tonight at the time of the recording. It will have been out for months by the time people listen to this. But, fucking rules. It's good. You like it.

I really like it. I really like it and I'll say this. This might be one of the harder director rankings at the end of this maze. Interesting. I was about to ask, and I'm like, I forgot you do the full ranking at the end.

We do. Also, it's not, this is a hard one because there's only five movies. There's only five. I mean, like, Fosse was a similar deal. Right. But this, they're pretty close together. I know what you mean. Okay, can I ask a question?

Okay. Are your ones clear to you? Yes. I think one and two, I think they're two movies pretty much dead tied for one and two. I haven't rewatched Monkeybone as of the time of this recording. Okay, rude. I think three, four, and five might also all be on a similar level.

I think there's one, two at like five-star masterpiece, and then three movies I put between three and four. Interesting. I mean, I would agree with that. I just know what the number one is. Yeah, I think that's clear. Yeah. We're not going to say it, are we? We're not going to say it. This is why

it could be interesting in the next episode. Alright, well, I'm not going to say anything, but I do have something I want to say about Coraline. This is my favorite film that. All right. Well, I'm not going to say anything. I mean, I think it's culturally clear. This is my favorite film that Henry Selick has directed. I'm not giving anything away or whatever. But like this would be my favorite film he's made. Right. Okay.

So that's like a hint. Interesting. That's like a little dusting of clues for people to, you know, they can follow the trail. Yeah. I mean, this movie fucking rips. It is so good. Ben, you had not seenips. It is so good. Ben, you had not seen it before.

Really? No. Okay. You ever hung out with Coraline before? She's kind of Benny. Yeah, she is. You know, cool, spooky, you know, kid digging around in the mud. A little stinker. Yeah.

Definitely a little stinker. She's a little brat. Definitely got some tood. I think even like sort of similar dynamics somewhat with my parents. They both were like working pretty hard. Yeah, exactly. Only child. Only child.

I wasn't even making that connection. With workaholic parents. You talk a lot about your like only child syndrome with older first-time parents who were very preoccupied with their careers and adult stuff, quote unquote. Yeah. And didn't have time to like entertain you. Definitely. Or go to your level. I did not think about how hard this movie might hit

for you until right now. Yeah, it got me in a place where it's so dreamlike. And so I feel like it really tapped into some kind of interior place. Okay, here's a starter question. Because the three of us have siblings. JD, David, and I. Yes, I grew up with two older sisters.

What's our sibling count here? I'm oldest of three, but my brother's three years younger. So I didn't have very long as sole domain. Same. I'm the older brother. I do have a half-sister, but I didn't grow up with her. So that sort of doesn't, you know, it's a different vibe. So she was-sister, but I didn't grow up with her. So that sort of doesn't, you know, it's a different vibe. So she was in New York, but you didn't grow up with her?

Go on, JD. Ben, what was your, I forget your siblings. I'm an only child. He's an only child, that's what I'm saying. Like Coraline. He's like Coraline. Right. Okay. Yes. Understood. Classic Coraline Ben over here.

Yeah, Ben's a bit of a Coraline. Yeah, I was an unpleasant kid too. I don't think Coraline Ben over here. Yeah, Ben's a bit of a Coraline. Yeah, I was an unpleasant kid too. I don't think Coraline is unpleasant. I do, but I think it's a little riddle. I think it's a strength of the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because she's definitely in pain mode. She's pain in the neck mode for a lot of the movie.

The way that she does it, like she can't make friends really. Yes. I related to a lot. Right, she's a little prickly on first meeting. I mean, there's one kid you see her interact with the entire movie. Yeah, to be fair, he's a little annoying. I know, but she just comes on so hard from the get-go. I mean, it is also that kind of...

And at the end of the movie, she's sort of, like, jokingly negging him. How old do we think, like, Coraline's 11 or whatever, right? I think so. So here's a question I want to start with. Because I do feel like when you're like 10, 11, like boys and girls, back then.

We're going to dig into the psychology of Coraline as a character. Has anyone here read the book? No. No, I've not. I feel like we're a generation too old for it.

Yeah. Yeah, because that book came out in 2002, so I would have been like 16. Right. Yeah, and I was whatever. Like, Romilly, my sister, read it, and I feel like not only read it, but it was just like one

of the books that everyone reads. It's a slim box. I think it's continued generationally as one of the books that every kid reads when they can read chapter books for the first time. The book is really, really good. I really recommend it. Honestly, if anything in Coraline piqued your interest in the movie,

I would say read the book. It's Neil Gaiman. It's neil gaiman they're different in a lot of ways one of the things that i think is interesting that i want to bring up is that in the book i think coralline's much younger she feels much younger the coralline in the movie feels much more much older and a lot more emotionally verbal yeah yes which i thought was very interesting. She's quite capable, which is, I love that in an animated protagonist. She's still a kid, but she's like a pretty independent, you know, happily independent kid. Yeah, exactly.

And very self-assured. She's quite self-assured, although I would say, you know, her prickliness maybe belies a little bit of self-consciousness. That's another thing that i thought was interesting is that in the adaptation the movie a lot of the characters a little pricklier than the book which is was always interesting to me because it's got a little this movie was made by a warm-hearted and generous man who's always nice so i don't get that at all

yeah well that i mean there is a lot of it's for a kid's movie there's a lot of edge running through this in a lot of ways which i think we're going to touch on is there's moments where you're like a kid's movie this is what like but this is what i mean so this is one of the reasons this is a a great film yes yes um and the fact that this kid's fantasy like i mean that's why asteroid i really think she i'm gonna say she's 11 i'm gonna say she's basically like a fifth grader yeah right the fantasy of a kid that age is still like i get everything i want it's almost a little mean like you know like you know what i mean like it's so selfish what she's the paradise she's being offered right it's not just like whatever video games and cakes it's so selfish, the paradise she's being offered. Right. It's not just like, whatever, video games and cakes.

It's like, he's silent because you don't like when he talks. You know what I mean? Like, that slightly unnerving lack of empathy that kids have. The fascinating thing that she, like, resents that her parents don't conform to, like, traditional 50s sitcom gender roles. Right, right, right, right, right. like traditional 50s sitcom gender roles. Right, right, right, right, right. That she wants her dad to act like father knows best and she wants her mom to be in the kitchen

baking with an apron on. Yeah, and I think what's interesting, right, is in the book and the movie, in the movie in particular, right, the exploration seems to be of that thing that you go through as a kid, right? You have all these hopes and dreams of what you want your life to be. And then that you go through as a kid, right? As you have all these hopes and dreams of what you want your life to be.

Yes. And then when you actually interface those, you realize that's like, oh, the life, well, the life that you have is the life that you want, which I would say is the theme of every Henry Selick film. Yes. Sure. Yes. Yes.

Sure. Yeah. Like, I'm a big proponent of the fact that I think for a lot of directors, most of their films are about themselves in some way, right? And I think there's, it's interesting because I can think of sort of like a lot of categories of directors, but I can break people down into two. There's directors who make the same film over and over again, and there's directors that make like a lot of different movies. Yes. I always think it's so interesting. and there's directors that make a lot of different movies.

Yes. I always think it's so interesting. A lot of people sometimes begrudge directors or creators that create the same thing over and over again, where it's like, they're just doing the same thing. But if they're good, they're revealing different... Yes, and I think that's fascinating to me, because what that means is that that person's trying to work something out, and they're just going to keep doing it.

That's their life's work. I support it. This is another thing I find... And some directors shouldn't stray outside of what they're just gonna keep that's their life's work i support it this is another thing i find directors shouldn't stray outside of what absolutely and when they try you're like oh this they don't have any connection right or they're not passionate you know it's like they're not yeah exactly there's not a there there that they're trying to wrestle with or process no and i mean it's so often when people have this sort of like oh great another one of these attitudes i'm like do you actually want to see that director make the type of movie that you claim you want to see? Would you not rather see someone else make that type of film? This person's film cannot be for your liking, but it's

like, if you're complaining that Wes Anderson is making a, you know, a twee outsiders versus systems comedy, tinge with pathos and father issues. Then it's like, what do you think you want out of him? Maybe you just don't like him. That's fine. Now, to that end, Henry Selick's is particularly funny because it is so specifically the same story over and over again, right? Yes.

Sure. It is always like a character who's like lured by circumstance, by their circumstance to another universe. Sure. So like a Skellington being lured to Christmastown, a James being lured to Peach World. A man being lured to the interiority of his creativity or whatever. And it's a place that at first might be somewhere they want to be. That's their dream.

They like it. And then it becomes evil or there's challenges that they don't anticipate or that aren't going to solve the thing. And then at the end, their desire is to get back to the world in which they started. The status quo. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the one exception to this is the flip of James,

where, and we talked about this a lot in the episode, the first 20 minutes of James are like the most unpleasant reality ever committed to film. That is the one in which the character

is correct to not want to be where he is, and the thing he's dreaming of is everything that he hoped it would be. And he ends in New York City. He has family and friends.

He goes to New York City. Sirocco Dunlap points at him. Everything's perfect, right? That's the one that's flipped. But it is this thing I find fascinating, and it really clicked for me watching Nightmare Before Christmas this time, is, like, very often,

select characters don't really learn their lesson. Right. They return to where they started. Right. But with a sort of arrogance. Right. Jack Skellington definitely doesn't really learn his lesson. You have this musical number that's literally called, like, Jack's Lament.

Yeah. Poor Jack. That ends with him being like, no, fuck that. I'm not going to feel bad about myself. I fucking killed this. Best Christmas ever. Jack the Pumpkin. He goes back twice as resolute james again i mean obviously it's based on a novel but like he he overcomes his fear of death and like what his parents went through but you

know he confronts something and moves and he comes back to reality yeah yeah so he's a little different and i will not spoil wendell for you, but there's a sort of reality underworld thing, right? Got it. But there's also a, the current day version of this town and the past version

of the town thing. He's once again dealing with, there's always two realities. Yeah. There's a character who starts in one and dreams of being in the other. Right.

It's always macabre, kind of, too. Yeah, he's got a thing. He's a spooky fuck. Yeah. Yeah. But I like, it's, I remember,

you know, because I took Romley, my sister, see that she would have been... It's 2009, so she's about 10 years old. She's 11 at the time. She's Coraline-aged.

Perfect age for this. Has read the book, loves the movie. And they were talking about it at school, and her teacher was like, that's Coraline aged. Perfect age for this. Has read the book, loves the movie. And they were talking about it at school and her teacher was like, that's not a good movie. Wait, really? And she was affected by this and she went back and was like, my teacher was arguing

that Coraline wasn't good. You agree with me that Coraline's great, right? And I was like, yeah, what's his fucking argument? And she was like, he says it's dramatically bad because she starts out being sort of a brat and she doesn't really learn her lesson at the end of the movie she's still a brat and i'm like i think that's interesting do you think i don't think that's true i think she does change but i think it's not in the sort of holistic she completely transformed way that a lot of very

pat movies no but she learns the lesson of like i shouldn't take my annoying parents for granted they're all right yeah it's a very clear my life circumstances but a lot of movies would it would be her hugging them crying being a perfect little girl this and that even when she like goes to yb and she's sort of like no you're all right by me she's still negging him when she does that. But like, the spirit of... I like that no one changes that much in a way that's somewhat realistic

within a celibate movie. I also think there's a thing that happens. And we don't have to go too far down this rabbit hole, but there is a notion, especially in American entertainment, that holds on to the like Campbell-esque hero's journey as the definer of what a story is. And the only... Yes. And it drives me nuts. Yes. Right. Because there's people that are like, you know, a story arc, like, you know, a beginning, middle, end, it's an arc,

you come back, it's like, that is a type of story that is a, you know, obvious, you can get into the intersectionality of where that comes from and what that represents in terms of like the Greek and Roman storytelling being passed down through their empire, all this stuff. But I think it's very limiting. Yes. And it's very limiting. And I think some great stories don't fit into that rubric. And I think that can unsettle people when it's not like,

oh, the exact same. And not to, Coraline's pretty hero's journey-y. So it's not, we're not far off there. It's quest-y and she's... But even still,

he sort of defies that always because the growth is so kind of quiet and internal. As much as there are crazy externalized circumstances around the characters, it does feel like it's slight changes that happen

within them. Yeah, I mean, it's hitting all the beats of the Campbell aspect, but the point being, I like a character sometimes that doesn't learn their lesson. Yes. Because the point of storytelling to me is not that the character has to learn the lesson, it's that the viewer, the audience learns the lesson. Well, that the viewer, the audience learns it. Well, that's fair.

That's a good point. I like that. I mean, I agree with you on that. And it's fair. People don't always have to be learning lessons. Lessons are overrated. But this movie reminds me a lot of Spirited Away, one of my favorite movies ever.

Very similar. And there's a lot of movies, a lot of children's stories along these lines where the lesson is more like you lose your parents. Your parents are taken away for whatever reason, temporarily. Yeah. You have to, you know, struggle on your own. And then when you get them back, you have improved or you have had that experience.

And you're happy to see them. But you are different because you're like, well, I did make it without you. Right. And there's like, that's like very satisfying when you're a kid. Also, that you kind of know the world sucks now. now like there's something about this exact age we're talking about 11 mature you're starting to become autonomous enough that you're like why is anyone fucking telling me what to do why can't i do everything the way i want to but the sort of like crushing existential dread of like teenagerdom has not hit yet.

Yes. 11-year-old, 12-year-old. Has anyone ever read, you probably haven't, but has anyone here ever read the book The Thief of Always by Clive Barker? Yes. Yes, I have read that. It's a similar book, a similar story to this. And Barker and Gaiman both sort of... They're similar guys. British freaks. Who like making children's stories

even though that's not their number one thing. They'll occasionally dabble in young adult, and you're like, ooh, this is spicy for young adult. Right, right. And I love, it was one of my favorite books as a child, and I've read it a million times.

It's the same thing of like, the kid is tempted to another place that's a paradise. The paradise is a false paradise. When it's the same lesson of like, he's going home. He'll be safe. He remains a kid.

It's not like he's going home and he's 35 years old. Yeah. But he did all this on his own, and that's valuable. Yeah, and this takes place in the Hellraiser universe? It does not. But you should read it. I mean, you'll read it in a day. It's so fucking good.

A little aside, I always think about how the one Cenobite is a kid, and it really messes me up. Yeah, that sucks. I just rewatched Hellraiser. It's like when a kid is raised in Scientology. You didn't even give him a chance. Well, these Cenobites are always

fucking. They're going to have kids. Ben can't relate to this. Ben looks like Flummox about why that would be a curse to be a Cenobite child. I'm sorry, what? Well, then why are you looking confused that I'm saying one of the Cenobites is a kid? Ben is confused by you presenting that as a negative. Yeah, I don't get it.

What's wrong with that? All the Cenobites at some point revert back to what they looked like as normal people when they summoned the lament configuration. And one of them is like a kid. And I'm like, that's dark. Sure. It makes me uncomfortable.

Ben spent his entire fucking socks. Hellraiser doesn't make me uncomfortable most of the time. Ben spent his entire childhood rooting around for Lament Configurations. He was trying to become a Cenobite child. Absolutely. Just a vote here. If we all had the Lament Configuration, who here would have put it together and just summoned the Cenobites willfully? What do I what do i know

you know i know what's gonna happen yeah you know uh ebay whatever like it's gone i don't want it but i think the idea of the lament configuration is like if you're being handed it the guy already knows you want to fuck with it yes and he's not just like oh i found this and you figure it out yourself it's like it's someone who's just like, look, I've tried everything. Right, and it's you, you have this, you have the carnal call to it, like you're not, it's...

I mean, it would be seconds later. I would have it. The guy, the whatever, antique dealer wouldn't even be done explaining what it is, and Ben would be like, I finished it. He would be drawing in his breath

to blow the dust off, and I would already... Ben would post wanted ads for lament configurations on Craigslist I just rewatched Hellraiser because I was upstate pinheads like calm down

he takes them himself give me those hooks I was upstate with David Ehrlich Humblebrag and he'd never seen it and I was like alright fuck and I was upstate with David Ehrlich. Humblebrag. And he'd never seen it. And I was like, all right, fuck. Have you ever seen Hellraiser? Yes.

And I was like, one of those things. He calls himself a critic. Exactly. And we put it on. And of course, to his surprise, you know, the Cenobites don't show up in that movie for like a full hour. Yes.

And he was like, wait, this movie is about like a lady who like cucked her husband with his filthy brother. Like, because that's mostly what Hellraiser is about for a while cucked her husband with his filthy brother. Because that's mostly what Hellraiser is about for a while. It's one of those franchises. It's about a guy so horny he had to call the Cenobites. He's just like, I've done it all.

It's one of those franchises where the first movie is so different from the cultural idea of what the franchise is. Parker had no control of the sequels. And the sequels, they were like, Cinnabites wall-to-wall, right? Also, Hellraiser 6 is like a cop drum. It's like a Saw movie. Anyways, I want to pause for a moment and just imagine... Something Cinnabite-y

about this murder. That's what it is. Something from the book of Saw. I want to imagine the image for a second of the two Davids upstate in a little log cabin with the fire going and hot cocoa in their hands. Wipes their shoulder and left back home in New York. No, no.

They were there. I mean. No, but this is the image I want. The whole thing. I take these trips with them every year. We always leaf peep. We always have a leaf peeping weekend. Me and David and Howard. A leaf peeping weekend? Youeping weekend you go upstate you peep some leaves because it's uh the leaves are changed did you create this term no definitely oh no that's a that's a leaf peeping week i mean i leave peeping defer to you as the people i've

never heard you peep the leaf for two oh absolutely i love people and we actually nailed the weekend this was very good he's the one who made it the united states before okay oh yeah right yeah the america should have been called peep peepsylvania anyway um uh but uh i just that's an old john stewart joke that always got me where the like you know amerigo vespucci right yeah it was like there's a reason you know it's not called vespucci and idol i always thought that was funny um we watch we watch all ritual movies. We watched that movie, The Ritual. Yes.

That's a ritual movie. I think I've seen The Ritual. It has a good monster in it. It's not very good. Which one's the... Wait. It's like a bunch of guys go hiking in Sweden and, you know,

classic like, ah, this trail's too long. Let's take a shortcut through the haunted forest. And things work out well in 2017? No, I have not seen it. It's like not that good but it has a good monster has a fun monster i love it then we watched lair of the white worm have you seen that the ken russell movie no great movie check that out very campy 80s ken russell at the end of his life you know young hugh grant oh ritual is the brookner the night house hell the night house guy yeah

and right and of course he did the Hellraiser reboot. He did the new Hellraiser. And so when Hellraiser came up, I was like, look, we're in ritual territory. This is like the most ritual movie ever. It's all rituals. Rituals wall to wall. Anyway, I can't remember why I was talking about this. So anyways, Coraline

completes the Lament configuration and is summoned to the other universe. It's the same thing of like you do the thing you probably shouldn't do right you open the door you go to the place you're summoned to the void and you are summoned and it is now you're in like

another world where it's like what are the rules here yes and to get back to where this all started which was what Griffin was saying was there is a thing in cinema or in life that we explore

through cinema that age of like six to eleven where you start experiencing this this desire for independence but it's not

the teenage desire for independence where you want to fly from the nest it's that you want to know that you can fly from the nest you just wait

you want to you want to push against the boundary. Maybe get your hand out and then be like, okay, okay, all right, all right. And then you retreat into being like, I want my parents to fucking do shit for me

while they still can. You know, there becomes a balance of, what do I want my parents to fucking handle so I don't have to deal with? Which adult responsibilities do I want to avoid and which things do i want to push further away from yes and once that's taken away the comfort of your parents that that that gets it's a really scary feeling i think the master of this is miyazaki right like you look at all his like

totoro is the exact great example of that it's this fear of being without your parents i mean i think spirited away is the the group yes it's scarier yes the parents literally transform it's frightening you don't know if they're coming back and then of course her identity is under threat spirited away is the the group yes it's scarier yes the parents literally transform it's frightening you don't know if they're coming back and then of course her identity is under threat totoro is like the more younger kid yes it's even younger it's like you know we're being independent and you're you understand that they're like but you understand they could not be there and that's the fear that's that's what they're kind of like working through. I feel like this is a thing that gets thrown around too often and perhaps too lightly now.

But this does feel like one of those few movies you could put into like American Ghibli-esque films. Yes. And a big part of it is, you know know all the movies we've been talking about the first two purely stop-motion select movies are 75 minutes long right right most stop-motion films were like 75 minutes long takes a while to make these things this movie is like 140 it's pretty much like 134 before credits um that extra 15 minutes it feels like is mostly devoted to, the term is ma, right? Isn't ma the term that Miyazaki uses

for like the sort of moments of existence in between the story, the thought? Like there's things in this movie, like when Coraline is playing, sort of occupying herself with the lump in the rug. I wrote that down as I was watching. Yeah. To me, that's the moment that I felt

was this film operating at its best. Yes. When she's, that there's this sort of bunched up part of the carpet that she keeps stepping on. I love all that stuff. To me, that was the moment that felt. When she goes to the clothing store with her mother

and she's trying to get her attention. Yeah. This movie has like robust prologue epilogue that I feel like would be the thing you'd cut if you're like, fuck, we can only afford 70 minutes. But also, for a movie that's so much about the boredom of this girl, it does spend time in the boredom. It does spend time in that feeling. It evokes so well of when you're a child

and you're looking for anything to keep you entertained. How to turn anything into a game. Especially if you're lonely. You know? And you know, animation is so difficult. I feel like this is sort of the point that Miyazaki always tries to make is that most people don't want to spend

the effort to depict those small moments. Because those small moments aren't free in the way they are in a live action film where you can just have an actor do something for 10 seconds

on screen. That you have, it takes as much craft to make this thing happen. It's so expensive. It's so time consuming. But those moments are really important.

And especially for this film and setting, like a tone and a mood that is very different than most American animated films. As much as this falls into the spooky stop motion world. It is spooky.

There's a patience and like a weird quiet to this movie. Yeah. I will say since I know sometimes as a blank check listener myself I don't I haven't watched the movie sometimes and so to those who are catching up the basic premise of Coraline is she's like a...

Let me go through the plot. In fact, let me crack open the dossier and then we can talk about the plot. All right, so we haven't talked Monkey Bone yet, full disclosure. We have not recorded that episode yet. Oh, interesting. Ben has yet to get boned.

Oh my gosh. I have not boned. Ben. So Monkey Bone was maybe like the most anticipated film of my childhood. It was way up there for me as well i was like because i knew i was a big animation nerd and i knew who henry selleck was and i was like oh my gosh making a live action film and i feel like the premise of monkey bone

is like the first idea most kids have when they're like they're like oh and then you go inside and all the characters like it's such a classic. And so I was like, this is going to maybe be the best movie ever made. Did you see it? I did see it. And what did you think? It's a very long movie is what I remember as a kid. Right.

But as a kid, you were not like, I like that. I don't get why people didn't like it. No, I struggled with it as a kid. I liked it a lot as a kid. I'm very curious to rewatch it. I haven't seen it in probably 20 years, but I watched it multiple times as a kid and was always a kid, I'm very curious to re-watch it. I haven't seen it in probably 20 years, but I watched it multiple times as a kid and was

always a defender, even in the face of most people shitting on it. It was equally anticipated for me, but I was at an age where I was capable of clocking a movie like that as a disappointment. Like, Burton Planet of the Apes is that same year, and I was like, I know this isn't working. I can't even

lie to myself that much on this one. I think Monkeybone is the first time that I was like, oh. It isn't working. I can't even lie to myself that much on this one. Yeah, I think Monkeybone is the first time that I was like, oh. It might... There is that thing when you're a kid. It might not be, oh. Also, when you see movies, when you're, again, around 10 or 11,

you start being like, hmm. I didn't like that, I think. Because I used to like every movie ever, but this one wasn't so good, yeah. Exactly, because I remember I like Monkeybone. I'm sure there's stuff in it now as an adult I'd watch and really enjoy. Oh, that's cool. But I remember as a kid being like, oh, this isn't what I imagined it was going to be.

I remember my parents would always talk about Dark Crystal that way. I love that Dark Crystal as a kid. And they're like, it's so long. It's a really long movie. And I was always like, no, it's great because that was what a movie was to me. It's also not that long. It's a really long movie and I was always like, no, it's great because that was what a movie was to me. It's also not that long. Really? It's like 90 minutes long. I think it probably just felt long.

It's really slow, that film. A movie I love and it also is like incredibly oblique plot-wise. It's one of those movies where famously Henson wanted to try to tell the story with as little dialogue as possible. And it made no sense.

But to this point, Monkeybone was highly anticipated and then was for a long time in that state where it was like delayed for a very long time. Very extended post-production process. They moved it around the schedule like 18 times. It finally comes out it's dumped at the beginning of the year what i was gonna say it bombed really it made 5 million against a 75 million dollar budget and that's before everything you know it was marketing or

one of the biggest swaps of its year and there was a real sort of gang up like this is a disaster but a huge problem was that Fox's animation product, which this was not, but it was still under Bill Mechanic, which was a disaster. Like Anastasia did well, but Titan A.E. was a big bomb. It was developed under Fox Animation. And by the time it comes out, Fox Animation is dead. And so it's shifted from being a Fox Animation project

to a Fox live action project where no one wanted it. So director jail for Henry Selleck. Yes. You know, you like, fuck you. You, you,

you cost us so much money. It truly felt like one of those things that he might never come out of. It was such a sort of radioactive bomb. Yes. Neil Gaiman around that time does hand him his upcoming novella, Caroline. And, you know, Selleck is intrigued, Neil Gaiman, around that time, does hand him his upcoming novella, Coraline. And, you know,

Selick is intrigued, but also is like, I saw a movie in it, but I felt like it needed more flesh on its bones just because the story is quite short. He did take it to Bill Mechanic, who is like, write a screenplay. Pre-agent at this point?

Yeah, exactly. But like, you know, I guess just looking for a supporter. Gaiman is like write a screenplay pre-agent at this point yeah exactly okay but like you know i guess just looking for a supporter gaiman is like you take it from here like you know i'm not gonna be fussing like i trust you like that's it gaiman famously sort of in and out sometimes he's very hands-on with adaptations of his work because he's been burned. But this is around the same time he's doing Mirror Mask, which is like his movie. Yeah, that's him and Dave McKeon's big visual project.

The big thing that Selick does, obviously, is he adds the character of YB. Because he was like, she needs to talk to someone. Literally. Because the book is obviously, I'm sure, all in her head. Like internal narration or whatever. I really like Coralineine i'll say that's a movie that i really like my hot take is i don't think we need yb you don't like yb but he's got a little mask a little you

know welder's mask but i i get where you're coming from because i think it was necessary but i do like him as a character because i think it would force us to have more of these. David's doing Wybie posture. Yeah. Doing being Wybie. He's got a little Igor. I think it would force us into having more alone time with Coraline, which maybe would slow down the movie. I think it just might be tough, literally,

for kids to handle that little dialogue. I think it's true. Yeah. But I, yeah. And also, I like Wybie. I'm pro Wybie. I'm a huge fan of just his fucking mask, helmet, whatever you want to call it.

This is not surprising. I mean, his dirt bike, absolutely. It would be easy for a character like that, though, on a little dirt bike with a skeleton costume to feel a little kid movie cool. You know what I mean? Like, boy, here comes the kid on the skateboard or whatever. But he's so genuinely awkward, right?

Yeah. That's sort of sweet. Yes. Also, he transplants it to America. That's the other big thing he does. The book is British. Yes. I also think there's a little bit of literalizing

of the events that goes on in the movie that the book is a little more, keeps them internalized a little bit more. I think the book also, it's like, she goes to the other world once and is stuck there. Like, Selick is the one who makes it more back and forth. Which I love. Yeah, me too.

Because you're upending the rules of how all of these movies work. Like, J.J. in his dossiers keeps on... She comes back. Maybe she does. He just says he built it up more, like he wanted her to do multiple dreams. He wanted it to feel like maybe it's a dream, right? Like, maybe it's like this is happening when she falls asleep. Well, I think the book is more like he wanted her to do multiple dreams. He wanted it to feel like maybe it's a dream, right? Like maybe it's like this is happening

when she falls asleep or whatever. Well, I think the book is more like that. Fair enough. I think this, there's like a lot more like story context of Wybie being like, my grandmother's... Oh, sure. It becomes more literal like,

oh, this bad thing's actually happening. Which I think is not... Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. Not bad necessarily. The strangest thing is that Bill Mechanic had a production deal with Disney

that he had signed that prevented him from developing animated projects, specifically. And so they had to initially pretend that they were planning on this being a live-action film. And Michelle Pfeiffer was considered for the other mother i mean would be perfect yeah um but that's kind of one reason it just is sort of floating in development for a long time i wonder if that was like a a non-compete thing if that's some vestige of his fox it's like yeah yeah

you can come aboard buddy but like we're disney so we're already doing animated right you can come aboard buddy but like we're Disney so we're already doing animated films you can't like bring us animated films I guess well there's also the destroyed history of Laika's creation of which this was the first well we're gonna

because that's so but in between first the guy who comes to Selick while he's in director jail is Wes Anderson because Wes Anderson

uses him for the life aquatic to build the little stop motion animals the whales or whatever the fuck which it truly feels like this is what build the little stop motion animals the whales or whatever the which it truly feels like this is what henry's called what's the the jaguar shark yeah but all

the all the uh aquatic life yes in life aquatic all the fish are henry selick which i think a lot of people weirdly don't know but it felt very much like well this is what his career is going to be yeah he's going to be one of these guys where you're like, oh, Jack Cardiff was like the greatest cinematographer in history and then he made a film that got nominated for Best Picture. He did a couple more exploitation movies. My voice is all fucked up today.

Excuse me. And then pretty much went back to being a cinematographer. Right. Like, is this a guy who was indie, commercial, animation director, made a couple movies, and now is just sort of for hire, doing effects on other people's movies, doing short-term projects,

small, short-form projects? Right. But the other thing, of course, the sort of fork in the road thing is that because they collaborate well on Life Aquatic, Salek is like, you should direct Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I'm developing. And Selick was gonna do it and backed out because

Coraline was suddenly greenlit. And he was like, this was my original project. I'm sorry, I have to do this. They had it set up at Revolution. A great studio that never did anything wrong. Well, that's the thing. I think it also took a long time for that movie to get off the ground

because Revolution was collapsing. And eventually Fox had to buy it out of Turnaround. But yes, for a couple years there, it was like Wes Anderson and Henry Selleck are going to direct this together. And that's his way to get out of jail is teaming up with another director. Which can we imagine...

I don't... I'm so curious how that collaboration would go. I mean, there are two, based on, there are two guys

with particular points of view. I have no idea. based on sort of like what I've heard about. Wes Anderson seems like a friendly fellow, I will say. No?

Maybe not. I have no idea. I've never, I don't know, like in interviews, he doesn't come across as some sort of like No, no, no, no.

I think he's a friendly fellow, but they're both famously control freaks. Yes. They are incredibly particular exacting artists. Exactly. And of course, Selick says, this is his quote,

Wes Anderson's still mad at me, but I said, look, I worked on Coraline before I ever met you in this opportunity, has come up and he hooked him up with Mark Gustafson, who is like the guy who led animation. Yeah. So like, but I mean,

Selick saying Anderson's still mad at me. I think Selick perceives a lot of enemies around him at all times. I don't know to what extent Wes Anderson is mad at him. Hard to say.

Hard to say. But that, right. It's like, that's a momentary does this get Selick out of jail thing that doesn't happen.

If they fought, who do you think would win physically yeah I think Selleck I think Selleck is tough to beat he's wiry yeah well Selleck is like slender man that's what I'm saying though you know what I mean yeah like it feels like he sort of like scrambles up onto the ceiling and drops on top of you or something they both fall into the category of directors who look like they belong in their own movies. I think Wes Anderson has like a blunderbuss. Like, you know, he's got like sort of weird antique hunting gear.

Yes. That's his like, like if there's like a Mortal Kombat with like video game. Have you guys, fuck, have you announced the brawler that you guys are? We should do a Super Smash Bros with, you know, fucking directors. We should think of more of those What's the name? Let's get you a bow So, Selick in 2004 is hired

At something called Vinton Studios Which did like claymation Something called Will Vinton David, your ignorance is showing Pull your fucking pants up I was never claiming not ignorance of Will Vinton.

Will Vinton and Will Vinton Studios massively important. Yes, he's the California Raisins guy, right? Ten minutes talking about this. You don't understand how important this is. Five, five. I gotta say, love this guy's vibe.

First off, he looks He looks like he's about to sell saltwater taffies. Okay, this opens up like ten things I need to talk about. You don't understand how important Vindit is to stop motion animation. I never, ever, ever said otherwise.

You said something called... I'm cold reading a dossier. I am not saying anything else. You said Will Vindit doesn't matter. I didn't say something meaningless called Vindit. You said he can lick your fart. God damn it.

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Okay. Go ahead. Will Vinton is one of the like major figures of stop motion yes but who had a hard time getting these huge never had the platform that i think it's expensive yes it's you gotta give someone to give you a lot of money and it might not be a hit he literally worked in clay he was a a clay animator. For so long, claymation was a term used interchangeably with

stop motion because most claymation we saw was, most stop motion we saw, rather, was Ardman and Wilvin. The two most prominent studios were working in clay. Yes. Your kids' cartoons, like Svankmajer. Well, Svankmajer's more of the taxidermied animal,

but I guess he does a lot of clay stuff as well. Yeah. But they were like, yeah, plasticine guys. And Vint is this very interesting balance of, he had a lot of success in things like commercials for higher jobs. Right, right. He's a little bit like Richard Williams, actually.

He did the California Raisins. Huge. Yes. The Noid, apparently. This is what I'm saying. I'm reading some of his accounts. Much like Richard Williams Raisins. Huge. Yes. The Noid, apparently. Much like Richard Williams doing The Noid. Red, yellow, blue, green, and orange M&Ms. All him.

I think the thing that people would maybe most pop culture recognize him for is the stop motion stuff in Moonwalker. In Moonwalker? The Michael Jackson thing? His style is very distinctive. The look of his characters is very distinctive if you google wolvin you'll see a bunch of things you recognize yeah but the pjs yeah the the the richard williams comparison i think is apt because these two guys were

considered like absolutely top of their fields were sort of low-level moguls had their own studios everyone was envious of their craft they They were always in demand for higher gigs, especially commercial gigs and shit, or to come in and pinch hit on some studio project. Their own personal projects, their magnum opuses, were like vaguely disastrous. Sure, right. When they were like

unfettered or whatever. The Mark Twain movie does get credited as the first feature-length stop-motion film, is that correct? The Adventures of Mark Twain, 1985 stop-motion claymation film. I believe it holds that title. Sure. I don't know. It is a bananas film.

Some people might remember it as like it was, I feel like, especially in the 90s, a weird, deep-cable, constant-rotation movie. Yeah. It's on Amazon Prime right now. I watched it the other night. It's on Amazon Prime right now. I watched it the other night. It's bizarre. It's like two present day kids in a space submarine

with Mark Twain. Yes. They're chasing a comet. Flying around the galaxy. Cool. Not a hit. Will Vinton. Big flop. That can transition into the like of it all. Because what happened was But so... Not a hit, right. No. Will Vinton, then. Big flop.

That can transition into the like of it all. Because what happened was not a little... Pretty tragic in terms of his whole trajectory. Well, so, right. Because, like, when he's brought on board, it's Vinton and Phil Knight, of course, Nike founder, invested in this company. And Travis Knight, obviously, former rapper. Of course.

Then decides he likes animation. Yes. What rapper was he? Did he have a rap? Do we know? He did. Look it up. This is the son of Phil Knight.

He's the son of the founder of Nike. Founder of Nike. Sure. Well, you were telling me a little bit about this the other day. Has a record deal. And then finds his true passion. It's worse than I thought.

Stop motion. It's terrible. Chili tea. Chili tea! It's really bad. It's really, really bad. You know, look, if your dad founded Nike, you could pursue your projects.

And if you were 20 years old, they might be stupid projects. And I'll say this. When people hear that the director of kubo and the two strings had a rap career they're like that seems improbable if you watch his music videos it absolutely feels like who you would imagine directed kubo and the two strings interesting doing he has music video right right yes right it's not like that's bizarre that that guy has the personality of a rapper it's like no it's bizarre that that guy has the personality of a rapper. It's like, no, it's bizarre that a rapper had the personality of a stop motion animator.

Now, maybe you guys can explain this to me. I'll finish this. In 2002, Knight takes over Vinton Studios and it's renamed Laika in 2005. So what happens to Mr. Vinton? Is he put in jail for selling, you know, the saltwater taffy and it made someone sick? He just looks like a saltwater taffy sales it made someone sick he just looks like a saltwater taffy salesman he's got a big bushy mustache i think there's basically just a kind of complete financial collapse that is largely tied to the rise of cgi i don't know how much more we can

dig into this but but the company was just sort of shrinking and shrinking and shrinking with very high overhead and you know we talked about in the James and the Giant Peach episode so much that movie was, I've spent the time to build up a crew, to build up a studio, to have sound stages. I want to keep them working.

Right? Right. We need another project. It's the thing with his animation studios. And he had a big studio. He had a big company and the work was drying up

and it got worse and worse by the year. The PJ's thing is kind of like, it's like, that was such a big project. That was supposed to be the thing that would give them another 10 years. Murphy is producing it and it doesn't make it a season. Brian Grazer, Ron Howard.

It did two seasons. Oh no, sorry, Gary and Mike is the one that did only one season. Which was a UPN show. Which I always liked by the way. Never seen that. Never heard of it? Good. But this was the thing. They had a couple big failed projects like that and they're not getting

commercial work anymore. I can see why this didn't exactly light the world on fire. What about Celebrity Deathmatch? Who did that? I forget what the name of the animation studio was. I don't remember. The guy's name was Eric Fogel.

Eric Fogel. I want to preface this by saying I don't remember. The guy's name was Eric Fogel. And, you know, this... Eric Fogel. I want to preface this by saying I don't know the exact details, so I'm hearing this completely secondhand. Sure. What I have heard happened with the Will Vinton of it all

was that the studio was struggling, and Phil Knight said that he would make an investment. Yes. His son is, at that point, working at it. I love this.

Part of the investment was, my son has to have a major role here. His son was just an animator, I believe, at that point.

I don't know the details. I can't. Right. He was an intern. He would know. Part of the investment literally was hiring him as an intern. Right.

Gotcha. And then in 2003, when Phil Knight takes over the company, Travis is suddenly on the board of directors. Well, so that flip happened pretty quickly from what I've heard. I mean, from the timeline I can guess here, we're talking like five years maximum. Yeah, it was basically, it went from like, great, I'll invest in this, but can my son work here?

Yeah. Actually, I'm in charge and my son is going to be the one that's creatively charged. Yes, yes. But here's what I think is interesting. I think his son ends up

being pretty good at what he is. This is the whole, you know what I mean? It's the whole distressing thing of like, it all sounds so evil. Yes. And yet, every part of this should have been a nightmare.

Right. And I've heard stories about like, almost, you hear stories about any animation studio. Yes. Pixar, Disney, whatever, you know, like, where you're like,

oh my God, like people who work to the bone, it's so intense, right? You know, all that stuff. But at the same time, it's like, they are pretty much the only people making these kinds of movies

and it is nice to have them. Yeah. And Travis Knight has directed two films. Chili T. Huh? knight has directed chili tea chili chili chili has directed two films one a stop-motion film and one a film starring bumblebee of the transformers both of which i thought were pretty good yeah not like masterpieces yeah kubo's pretty good close to masterpiece kubo's yeah kubo has its problems but is a so like i don't know what to do about this it's beyond like regular hollywood nepotism where it's like oh it turns out this person's actors parents are actors like oh no this is yeah it's the the guy's dad like

bought him a studio i mean also say almost to his credit you're like his dad buys him a studio and then he doesn't direct a movie until they're four in though it was the fourth one right yeah you know it's not paranormal and then but yeah it's it's a very bizarre story he does that he does bumblebee he's now directing the next like a release is he yes okay and then he also just signed up to do Six Million Dollar Man. Great. With Mark Wahlberg. Six Million Dollar Man apparently gets you a cup of coffee. But I think that's also

one of the bummers. You don't like my joke? David's pointing his cup of coffee. It's good. I like it. Thank you. That's one of the bummers I will say though

is that like a... Because I was an animator in college right and there's only so many places that you wanted to end up yeah right companies because there's not that many animation companies yeah it was like you get hired at pixar maybe go disney and then it was like some people were like oh what about like uh it's a bummer that sort of like one of the only paths to having a sustainable studio for stop-motion animation and to be in charge of it. It's like a charitable thing.

Yeah, a billionaire has to pay for it. Well, this is what's so odd about the Vint and Laika situation, right? Is I had it mixed up in my mind that he was already a low-level animator rather than the internship being part of the conditions of Travis Knight investing the money into it.

No, it was. No, I thought he was already there. But it was that he was already into stop-motion. But I believe, as the story goes, it was basically that, like, Travis went to his dad on hands and knees and was like, stop-motion is going to die as an art form if this company is

not saved someone needs to do it there is no uh american government investment into the arts fair point there's very little yes where so many when you watch like you look at the best animated short film nominees each year and it's like you might get one short film that's a Pixar or a Disney because they've started, you know, they've stayed investing in those. And otherwise you're mostly seeing foreign films that come out of countries that have like fucking arts grants and lotteries and funds for this sort of

shit for people to work in this medium that is not commercially viable. Um, but it is this thing where it's like, dad, you have so much fucking money. Can you find the kindness in your heart to save an art form? And then it becomes this hostile takeover

that makes a little bit of sense when you're like, not to be cynical and crass about it, but you're like, Vinton's old at this point. He dies in 2018. He had not been able to turn a profit in the company for about a decade at that point.

There is the argument that there needs to be fresh blood. When you go, the guy who bought it just installed his son at the top of the food chain within like 18 months of him starting there as an intern. That seems like red alert, red alert. But it works. Then he finally takes over as director on the fourth movie. It's really good. Then he takes a jump to doing American

live action studio blockbuster. That's the thing where you're like, well, right, is that going to work? So you're like, was he just using this as a leapfrog kind of thing to get to a bigger career? It felt craven for him to do a Transformers spinoff. Right. But then it was not a bad movie. And there was that moment where it's like, well, it's not great. They ended the distribution deal with Focus.

Laika signs a new deal with Annapurna. They release Missing Link. Missing Link bombs really hard. There's no new Laika movie announced on the horizon. That's right after Bumblebee's come out. And everyone's like, is Travis Knight bored with Laika? Is Laika going to be left in the dust?

And instead, Travis Knight goes back, invests new money in it, forms new distribution deals uh starts doing a new film at Laika continues to constantly like almost directed fucking Uncharted is now attached to Six Million Dollar Man like we'll jump in between developing live action films and directing movies for Laika and supporting other films there. It does seem to basically work. I know, but it's so... Reading this Wikipedia page,

you just want to fucking strangle him. Everything about this guy you want to... Yes. I don't want to strangle Travis Knight, to be clear. Boy, capitalism is great. I do think capitalism is great. No complaints there.

The only bummer is that Travis Knight's hobby wasn't like mental health advocacy and instead it was stop motion that his billionaire whatever look it makes people but it's also one of these things where it's like i'm just laughing because at myself i i agree where i'm like i'm like oh thank god someone is trying to keep stop motion alive but you're also like god if you like the only way to get anything done is like pull at the like tail coat of a billionaire and be like all right sir all right

let's get off travis night well not even i just need to clarify it's not like a chili pepper no it's like chili like cold yeah okay chili chili why because you know it looks like a t-shirt snow was hot back then yes you know if you're a white rapper snow was snow was so hot you know like it's like yeah it's i feel like if you're vanilla ice of course the weather phenomenon i'm like huh no it's like i think if you're a white rapper you might want to lean into like i'm cold icy snowy right you want to just go that direction maybe yeah i guess there's some correlation there coralline coralline and we're back. The first thing Selick does with this company,

you know, whatever, you know, is Moon Girl, which I have seen. A little short film. It's not very good. It's CGI. Right. So this is another thing where I'm like, the founder of Nike bought Will Vinton Studios, installed

his son, lured Selick over, and now the first thing they're releasing is a CGI short film. And I was like, everything's dying. Why are they working in CG? How has Selick sunk to this low? How embarrassing for everyone involved?

When they announced Coraline as happening as a feature in stop motion, I'm like you're skeptical just because there's no track record here like you know why would this

everything about the CGI films shitty it's one of these things where you're like this is around the same time that Flushed Away comes out yeah why are we doing

fake stop motion yeah like CGI'd stop motion yes I also remember there was because again I was in college

when this was all happening and I was an animator who was like, oh, maybe my dream is to work at Leica. I remember their whole thing with the 3D was like they were trying to build a new system that could basically use the principles of stop motion as the method for animating,-generated imagery, which it felt like a sort of backwards, but that was their big move. And I sort of... That was also the era where people were like, we're minutes away from computers being able to do everything. Yeah, exactly. It'll be easy.

But they really pioneered the use of 3D printing in stop motion, which involved doing a lot of pre-animation on computers and then just physicalizing it later. So that was all context to the fact that then that leads us to Coraline, which is the first Laika release, which has a lot of attention now on it

in the animation world in particular because it's like, all right, well, let's see. It's an embarrassing hobby film. But it's also, I guess the last stop-motion animated feature is probably Wallace and Gromit, right? Was there anything of note in between these two movies? Wallace and Gromit and Corpse Bride come out the same year. I was going to say Corpse Bride is the same year.

Wallace and Gromit underperforms at the box office here in the States. It's obviously big overseas. Right, it did very, very well in Europe, yeah. Chicken Run is still the only stop-motion film to pass $100 million domestic. So there was kind of this feeling of like Aardman had the potential

to be the next Pixar. It took them way too long to do a follow-up film. While Stuttgart wins the Oscar, is beloved. Sure, that was well liked. Underperforms at the box office. DreamWorks drops their deal.

Another thing that makes it feel like stop motion's kind of dying. Tim Burton was able to bring it back. Corpse Red actually did well. Corpse Red did well. Got an Oscar nomination. Got good good reviews but it sort of feels like maybe stop motion only gets made in a studio level if tim burton works into his contract well and the corporate thing is we talked about on the corpse right episode i believe was that people didn't

realize it was stop motion yes because they did so much cleanup and they did a good job it looks too clean we talked about this but i looks too clean. We talked about this a long time ago. But I don't remember if we talked about this, but it's like the contracts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

and Corpse Bride are done together at Warner Brothers. It's basically a one for me, one for you. And the same thing happens again with Alice in Wonderland

and Frank and Weenie. It's like when Tim Burton wants to, they'll let him make a stop motion movie as payment for making a bigger studio live action film so here's a question that i've always had about henry selleck and tim burton their styles that they become known for are so close to each other that i'm always curious in a chicken and egg sense if that's just,

that's why they came together. Because I think they met in college. Yeah. Yes. If that's why they found each other because they're like, oh, we like to make these sort of macabre, you know.

But it's so interesting because when you think of, I mean, obviously the Tim Burton of it all with Night Before Christmas. Yeah. People attribute that style to him. But if you see Tim Burton's own illustrations, it is that style of these.

He's making puppet versions of Tim Burton's illustrations, right? And this interesting thing we've talked about that every one of Selick's films has a different primary designer. of Selick's films has a different primary designer. He will pick someone with a very distinct illustration style and model the entire film in their vision. We have not seen a Selick movie that is like his personal art style, quote unquote. Because the first one he's doing Burton, then he's doing Lane Smith.

The name of the illustrator on this film, I forget, it's a Japanese illustrator. Yes, I have it somewhere. Tadahiro Yusuke. Right. And then Wendell M. Wilde, it's the New Yorker guy. Sure.

Yeah, I'm forgetting his name. We'll talk about it next episode. William Sean. No, he's the modern New Yorker guy who does the little portraits for profiles and things like that. Sure, right. And a lot of the movie review images.

Whatever. But they all tend towards this extremely disproportioned stick-thin big heads, which is, that's also easy for stop motion, right? But is it?

Well, because a big head, you can, like, change the faces. Yes, but I'm saying the proportions are not easy because it's like the characters cannot support themselves

at all. I think you think about being natural because the two of them have made that the sort of status quo. If you look at Will Vint and you look at Arteman, they're very stubby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Usually of these big-based characters that sort of waddle.

Same with Gumby. Like, you just kind of have these characters who are lumpy. Well, don't body shame Gumby. I mean, that's how the guy was born. They look healthy. Gumby's very healthy. It's muscle mass. Yeah, that's interesting, sure. So it so it's like annoying to deal with these things

well it's just they're so it's not a natural choice the legs will snap I guess it's like you can have such sort of expressive movement I think that's part of what makes them stick in the zeitgeist, is that they are

so expressive because they are so disproportionate, because their armature is basically barely covered in plasticine or whatever. It's a thing I feel so strongly watching, this movie, where any time a new character is introduced, you're like, fuck, I can't wait to see how this person moves.

Especially in this movie, with the neighbors. Okay, a little bit more. Moon Girl he makes, right. Especially in this movie with the neighbors and all that. Yeah. Okay. A little bit more. Moon Girl he makes, right? The whole thing is that, you know, Knight moves fucking Vinton to Oregon. Yes.

This is where Laika is based. That's where Phil Knight, you know, Phil Knight is Mr. Oregon. Yeah. They ask him to do, he has Coraline. They're like,

bring Coraline. We'll start work on Coraline. And then they're gonna back out and I'll say, Selick gives Travis Knight credit, calls him one of the best animators in the world, says that he worked on Moon Girl, and basically went to Phil Knight

and was like, we cannot block this project. This must happen. So apparently, you know, Selick says, Coraline was in trouble for being, quote-unquote, too dark, you know, up at Laika, and Travis Knight was the one who got it over the line. So that's cool. But you also think Travis Knight knight has to know if we're building an animation this is the number one guy we want in our stable um and it very much feels like so much of the formation of like is if we

can get selic here he can be our lassiter we can build this whole place around him um selic told the la times in 2005 that his plan with carline was to do the real world as cg and the magic world is stop motion they were considering using cg for the animation of this film glad they didn't yes um i mean i get the idea of the two world you know that's fun but still um bill mechanic thought stop motion was passe it's a fucking thing in animation i know where they're like boring thought stop motion was passe It's a fucking thing in animation I know Where they're like boring beautiful stop motion

Or beautiful hand drawn passe Why can't it be showy you know But they didn't really like How the CG looked In whatever test they were doing My new girl looks shitty It does My friend had a term recently.

I was talking to him. He was talking about, I won't name him for the reasons. I'll be clear as I tell this story. He was talking about he and his wife are in the stage where they're debating whether or not they want to have a child. And he was confessing to me

over several rounds of drinks. One of the things that gives him trepidation about having a child is having to watch children's bullshit with the kid. He's just like, the shit my friends who have kids, my brothers, their kids have to watch. It's so fucking dispiriting. And he said, every character

just looks like a shampoo bottle now. And it's such a good descriptor of this sort of blandness of so much CGIgi character roundedness the boring colors looks like a shampoo bottle and like moon girl is one of those things where you're like this looks like shampoo bottles but of course what's the thing they settle on is like okay if we're not going to use cg what can we use 3d 3d three-dimensional photography they've done it on nightmare yeah so, so that's the...

I think we didn't really talk about that much in that episode. I think we mentioned it. They do the 3D re-release that starts making like $10 million each year. This is the beginning of Disney starting to invest in 3D. Something like Chicken Little will come out and they'll put it on like 40 3D screens.

But it's starting to grow. Everyone knows that Avatar's in the pipeline. And they're working towards that, which everyone assumes is going to be the total threshold breakthrough moment. But this film comes out nine months before Avatar. It sure does. It's a real important film in 3D.

I am certain it is the first 3D movie I saw that was not like a movie about asteroids I saw at the Natural History Museum or whatever with like red green. Right. I think it's the first movie that I wore those real 3D movie I saw that was not like a movie about asteroids I saw at the Natural History Museum or whatever with like red green. I think it's the first movie that I wore those real 3D polarized glasses. The Rodriguez 3D movies are red and blue polarized.

And I didn't see Beowulf. I'm fucking sick. What's it called? Anaglyph. The red and blue is Anaglyph. Yeah, but I didn't see Beowulf because Beowulf is before this, right? No, no, no. It is. But all these things had

semi-limited releases. I'm such a fiend for 3D that I would go anytime. Meet the Robinsons, I think, had a limited 3D release. I remember when I saw this in 3D, it was like, oh, how funny. Look at these little glasses. This was a big deal. This was like, this is really kind of

announcing this as a medium. Yeah, and we can take a little walk to the history of 3D in that we don't have to go deep. A little walk. A little baby walk. We should stay seated, though. We'll stay seated. We're not going to, yeah.

No, actually. Well, walk around the room. So obviously, it was like 80s through the early 2000s. It was all of what you're talking about, David, right? It's like amusement park. Yeah, you go to the National History Museum. You go to Disney World. Giant headsets.

IMAX 3D documentaries that are 45 minutes long. They had non-red, blue, or like... Yeah, no, you're right. I saw some IMAX thing about a postal delivery man in Alaska. But they were like headsets. Yeah, you would wear these giant goggles. And the movies were under an hour. Yeah, so we can talk about that a little bit later in Alaska. But they were like headsets. Yeah, you would wear these giant goggles. And the movies were

under an hour. Yeah, so there's, we can talk about that a little bit later when we talk about 3D, but this, after around 2003, 2004 is when studios

and theaters started going, maybe 3D's the next big thing. And the issue was that people were not shooting 3D films. They were taking films and converting them to 3D. Right.

And back then, the technology was... So now when they convert movies to 3D, they will create actual sort of like 3D elements that things are sort of like fake projected onto, so that it has a three-dimensional depth to it. Whereas back then... Then basically, CGI animate a movie with the same shapes as the live-action footage

and then wrap the live-action footage around those shapes. Yeah, theoretically. Right. It's oversimplified, but yeah. What they were doing in the early mid-2000s is it was like, it was everyone referred to as paper cutout.

Right. Where it would just be like, great, this 2D plane is farther ahead than that 2D plane of Spider-Man. It looks like a pop-up book. You can just, everything is flat, but you can create layers of where those flat things are. It it looks funny it's i'm seeing double here for crusties yeah exactly so it was it wasn't very good there was a cut there was a few things that were shot

natively 3d but i think coralline was for a lot of people the first film and i we can get into it in a little bit about the about what they did technologically that was so impressive, but it was one of the first films that was shot natively 3D, and they did it so well. With actual cameras because it's stop motion. So many of the 3D, digital 3D movies that were coming out in these

experimental years were CGI films because they were easy to post-convert because you're just modifying the files that already exist in the computer, and there'd be a thing where like uh superman returns when it played in imax there were like two sequences that were 3d where they'd flash the symbol they they test the waters a little bit right but this is like in terms of a film that was actually shot with cameras intentionally designed for 3d this was a humongous step in the modern era. Because it also had to coincide

with the proliferation of digital cinema, right? So 3D, if you're shooting something 3D, for those of you who are not in the know, you basically have to have one camera for each eye. Because if you,

right now if you like hold your hand in front of your face, you know, as if you're doing an eye poke blocker, and you go back and forth between your left eye and right eye, your eyes are seeing different views of things. And so when you're shooting 3D, the whole thing that makes it 3D is that you're having these two views that your brain is processing into one image. You have to have two cameras that are next to each other.

And theoretically, they have to be next to each other at the exact distance that the human eyes are typically apart. That's what creates depth. Now, with film cameras, that's really hard because you've got these big bulky cameras that require film because they need to be super precise. And they need to be completely in sync because you can't have them off temporarily even a little bit because that's going to create this weird dissonance. Twice as loud. It's harder to do camera movements. All these things become incredibly complicated. And so digital cinema means that now you're dealing with digital processors, which means cameras start to get a little bit smaller, a little bit easier to deal with.

And you can sync stuff up digitally. So you're not trying to have things be mechanically synced. You can digitally sync them, which is a lot easier and better for 3D. But the rigs are still ginormous, and they don't exist. There is not enough flow of money or time for it to be something where people are

creating really easy solutions for this stuff. So the only films that can really do this, like shoot natively in 3D, are the avatars of the world that are investing all this money into new, huge budget technology. And James Cameron literally went to Fox and went, I don't know if this movie is doable.

Will you give me two years and $5 million to do some R&D and maybe I'll have a film. I don't know. Exactly. And so Coraline just happens to be right place, right time to make good use of some of this technology

in a really interesting way. A lot of the stuff that Cameron sort of field tested on the documentaries that he did in this period. A thing about the use of 3D in this movie. As a child, I used to always think that Wizard of Oz

had to be the first use of color in film because it feels so poetic and perfect. When the thing comes into color, you're like, oh my God, no one had ever seen this on a screen before. You just want to believe that was the introduction of color because it feels like, well, this is the moment where a world opens up even though color had

existed for a decade plus at that point in films right and also there's like those weird like hand tinting all this stuff um i i similarly feel jj keeps on in all the dossiers you know in in his very jj way of his very quiet sort of editorializing that only we read, talking about how much Wizard of Oz comes up with Selick, whether by his own admission or other people's, because the whole thing we're talking

about of the imagining another world, another place, another dimension, you know, these sort of alternate realities, what have you. Saying to Selick, you get to use 3Dd now you now have a tool that is kind of equivalent to being able to open the door into the world of color in wizard of oz it's one of the reasons that i argue this is the best application of 3d because it's so tied to the narrative obviously and avatar also has this thing obviously where it's a guy entering a different world.

Yeah, right. But, and Avatar is so experiential and, like, incredibly well executed. But so much of the technique that Selick uses here to make the 3D thematic,

to truly use depth as a very deliberate, storytelling tool rather than just like immersion yeah or have stuff jump out at you um it's kind of insane that he nailed it this hard when so much of what he was doing was basically uncharted territory and figuring it out as they went along. Yeah. And so that sort of leads to my feeling which is I think this is in my experience of watching movies the best, most

fulfilling as an audience member use of stereoscopic film that I have seen. Ben, like I know you watch this for the first time. Right, you're not seeing it in 3D. So you didn't see it in 3D. We should talk at some point about

how this was also tied in with the 3D television craze, which was a whole interesting universe. But we can leave that for later. No, we're going to talk about that. We don't have to talk about it. Don't worry about it. We'll get it back. What's our running time right now? An hour 20. We're recording two episodes today.

This is part one of the Carlisle episode. It might be three episodes. An element that you didn't get to see, which actually makes this film a good film that I like to a film that I think is incredible and a film that I hold in this very high esteem is what they do with stereoscopic imaging. So obviously we've talked here about Billy Lynn and everything that's happened there in this very high esteem is what they do with stereoscopic imaging. So,

we talked, obviously we've talked here about like Billy Lynn and everything that's happened there and how Ang Lee is one of the people that really thinks about this in a creative sense as part of the medium.

I would say that there's a lot, James Cameron does too, but I would say there's a lot of filmmakers that 3D to the studio is just an added thing to add to ticket sales. It's just an extra five bucks

they can charge you. Yeah. And so they shoot their film exactly how they'd normally shoot their film. Don't do anything to really, maybe they'll have one or two little things

at play with, oh, something's like, you know, passes in front of the screen or whatever. Even people who do it skillfully, immersion is usually the beginning and the end

of the thinking, right? Like, Scorsese will have a couple moments that are very clearly, explicitly designed for 3D. Yeah. He's certainly conscious of it in the end of the thinking, right? Like Scorsese will have a couple moments that are very clearly explicitly designed for 3D. He's certainly conscious of it in the framing of every shot in something like Hugo, but it's also like not tied to story in the same sense. I do remember Hugo using it quite nicely.

Hugo uses it well. Like Dark of the Moon uses it well. You know, there are other... Dark of the Moon uses it really well. But I will say this, not only from a story perspective, but again, stop motion ends up being the one place where you can actually

explore everything that stereoscopic has to offer. Yes. So something that I think is fascinating. And that's why I was sort of talking about the camera side of things, which I won't go too much deeper into it, but in the past for stop motion,

obviously they would use film cameras in the past, which was its own complicated thing. You take a frame, move your puppets, take a frame. It's this long, arduous process. You literally don't know if it's working or not until you get the footage back, developed from the lab. Yeah, well, they'd have things called lunchboxes

or things like that that would allow you to see previews of it. It was hard. Digital cinema comes along and makes it a lot easier because you can see your frames as they're happening. Corpse Bride, for example, is shot on a Canon 1D, but it was hard. Digital cinema comes along and makes it a lot easier because you can see your frames as they're happening. Corpse Bride, for example, is shot on like a Canon 1D, like a consumer grade camera that people probably have.

And they had to create all this technology to try to get it to work and operate, but it was a little clunky. So in Coraline, what they ended up doing is they used

a machine imaging camera, the type of camera that you would use in like a factory setting. What that allowed them to do was program the camera super specifically. So the reason I was talking about this two-camera thing is that when you're shooting live-action elements

with two cameras to get stereoscopic, one of the biggest early hurdles is cameras have lenses, which is the glass stuff that makes the light look cool. Yeah, we know from lenses. We know what lenses are. We've discussed them with you. Yes, exactly.

Right. So stereoscopic, if those lenses don't match, it could. Getting over a head cold. A little honk there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Holding that one in for like 15 minutes. A honk for a stereoscopic.

Honshu. Everybody, if you're in a car right now, give a quick honk to a stereoscopic. That's a new blanket thing. Yeah, if you're in a car and you listen to this episode, give a quick brr-brr for a stereoscopic. You should make a honk if you love stereoscopic bumper stickers. Actually, because I do feel like people don't understand.

Okay, so you have a camera for each eye. Some listeners may not understand. Yeah, yeah. So lenses, I think we think of as these finite objects that are just like, you know,

always perfect. Lenses are really imperfect things because it's glass elements, right? So lenses have a lot of these issues that can come about them that are unique to those lenses that you have to test in films usually to see if your lenses match just generally between shots,

let alone stereoscopic. There's things like chromatic aberration, where that's when your different color wavelengths don't focus at the same place. So that's when you get like the sort of edge coloring on weird lighted objects. You have like spherical distortion and aberration, which is like all these little things that make lenses unique, which is why also cinematographers will search out for lenses that have the perfect balance of all of these things. And it's not something you can really plan for. You just have to, each lens is going to have its own quality. But when you're shooting stereoscopic, right, each of those lenses represents one of your eyes. So if any of those lenses are different,

it creates these weird effects that don't quite line up exactly. And that's when stuff starts, because again, imagine if your eyes were seeing images that were even more different than they already are. You'd start to get a little, it'd take you a minute to adjust.

But we already have that with our eyes. Now add lenses to the mix. If the lenses of a 3D film are different, it's starting to create this weird thing. And Ang Lee talked about it so much and Billy Lynn we talked about is they had to search far and wide for lenses that were as close as humanly possible

because any differences between the lenses because all these huge images. Well, stop motion. Talk about 3D giving them headaches. It's because of, not exclusively, but so often these sort of discrepancies will cause your brain to have to work overtime. Right, well, also think of this.

If the cameras are off timing at all, that means the two images being processed in each eye when you're watching it are slightly different. And that's the stuff that creates these headaches and that makes you feel sick, is you're like, oh, this is like, the images aren't exactly the same. Something's messed up.

And you can't sense it. You just feel sick. Right. With stop motion, your subject isn't moving. Right? Obviously. You're taking still photos of it. You don't need two cameras.

So what they did is they took one camera, but take a photo. This already sounds stressful. This will move it over and then move it over. Yeah. And take another photo. Yeah. Now what's even more interesting about this is that normally when you are doing stereoscopic, you have to get those lenses really close to be the distance between human eyes.

You know what I mean? And a lot of times what you end up doing is you use these, um, these mirror deflection plates that, that basically use mirrors to shoot the images into the two different eyes so they can be much closer. Now you're dealing with another element of glass, which is mirrors, which is going to take down

some of your brightness. It creates all these issues. They're not having to do that. They're able to create that distance with this camera. And beyond that, a thing that they do that I think is fascinating, that makes this absolutely brilliant. Instead of having the cameras, the distance of human eyes, they have their cameras separated by the distance of the puppet eyes. So that your three-dimensional perspective in the sets is not that from a normal-sized person looking at these

miniatures, but from the three-dimensional perspective of someone who is of that from a normal-sized person looking at these miniatures, but from the three-dimensional perspective of someone who is of that size. I have a couple notes for you. Yeah. Notes or questions? Notes. One, you said the puppets don't move.

They do. When everyone leaves and goes home and turns out the lights, the puppets come to life and they move around. Just FYI. Did you see the after credits thing in Wendell Wong? Yeah. I love that.

Two, that's all very interesting, but James Cameron went to Pandora Did you see the after credits thing in Wendell Rock? Yeah. Wait until you see this. Right. To, that's all very interesting, but James Cameron went to Pandora and filmed a whole movie there. That was pretty difficult. He had to wear a gas mask and all that. Yes. So give him some credit. And work visas were a fucking nightmare on that movie.

Horrible. You've got to deal with, you know, fuck, I don't even know what the company's called in Avatar or whatever they are. Anyway. But the Na'vi workers unionized eventually, which I thought was really good. No, it was good.

I support them, obviously. Like, you know, I think they should be, you know, given, I don't even know what Na'vi currency is. They should be given

as many bows and arrows as they like. Yeah, yeah, AWOL bucks. Great. I'm sure they love that. Every four hours they have to stop to put their head. Right, they got to recharge. I don't know how to use it.

You mean mandated ponytail break? No, that's very interesting. So are puppet eyes further apart on their heads or is it that they're much closer together? Well, it depends on the design of the character. Because they're tiny. They're tiny, so they're much closer. The difference between the two,

the left and right movement of the camera. Right. They're tiny, so they're much closer. The difference between the left and right movement of the camera. Right. And that's also why they're using, what's so funny is like when you, if you are a film nerd

and you're looking up movies, you sort of like to look up like what cameras they're using and what lens system and like, oh, is this, did they use Zeiss

or Angenieux or this or that or is this a Panavision movie? For this, the camera they used was the Mega Plus EC 11,000 color CCD machine vision camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've got one of those. This is essentially like a Ford factory line camera. Yes, but it's- Like at a car manufacturing. Yeah, it's probably used to, I don't know, make microchips or something. Sure, sure. But they could program it super intricately.

And obviously the movement of the camera is being done robotically. Yeah. So they can have it be tiny. Oh, it's not just some guy who's like, I don't know what, is this two inches? But that's how they would do it before that. Back in the day, I'm sure, right?

Like Corpse Bride, they shot it on a 1D. Like that's a thing you have to like, you know, it's like your dad has a 1D to shoot pigeons in the in the park it's like it's like a sub iphone camera yeah it's like so i i just think it's fascinating and then the thing that ben i'm curious if you picked up on watching it for the first time 2d is that they do something fascinating that again you cannot do in any other thing except for stop motion this is the the argument. Which I think is

just like beautiful. This is not an argument. I'm not interested in an argument. We're winning. Finn, go on. No, David's on our, David knows this movie's beautiful.

I love this movie to death. Then you're right. It's not an argument because we've won. Finish your point, please. Griffin just wants you to take back that you call this

dumb animation nerds like eight years ago. You are dumb animation nerds. Nothing about this podcast is disproving that. supports that idea. What are dumb animation nerds. Nothing about this podcast supports that idea. What have you not heard of Bill Vinson? Then you look up a man who looks like a Mario villain.

Smart special animation boys. Also, he created the California Raisins. God damn it. Show some respect. Also, to be clear, I have a lot of respect for the man. He does not look like a Mario villain. He looks exactly like Sonic's villain.

He looks more like Eggman's dad. He looks like a Coney Island strongman. I respect the guy. I like that that was what that guy looked like. It's good. It's just funny when you guys are like, haven't you heard of this guy and i google anyway i like david's over will fit in studios trying to get him to tear a phone book open exactly like come on take this mallet let's see who can ring a higher

bell oh man okay so ben question for Ben. Yes. Sorry, no, you were doing. I was doing the buildup. Yes. So, Ben, I don't know if you noticed this, but what they did in Coraline, because Henry Selick, creators, and all the people were like,

we want to create this dissonance between the real world and the other world. Right, there's got to be a shift. We want the other world to feel magnificent to Coraline when she first arrives. And you got this redefined medium now at your disposal. So I noticed it only because I know,

but you might not have even noticed it watching it in 2D, is that all of the sets in the real world are tilted at an angle, like the floor and the walls, so that they can be flatter, so that there's very little depth to them. Okay.

So that, like, the room is actually, instead of being long, is really short, and it's a perspective trick. So that, like, they're animating these characters not on a flat ground, but on a angled ground

to make it all collapse in. It's basically like all the live action sets in James and the Giant Peach. They're using forced perspective to essentially make sets that are closer to cut out pop-up books. Yeah. And doing tricks with the physical animation of the characters to make it look like they're existing in a normally proportioned room. But the effect is they're shooting a space

that is close to flat. So that there's not as much depth and that everything feels more tight so that when she goes to the other world, suddenly they do the opposite. That fucking moment in a theater, if you can imagine when she opens the door and the tunnel extends all the way out.

Oh my gosh. It truly feels like you are looking into an infinite void i remember i saw this movie like three times in theaters yeah because it was just like well who knows if i'm ever gonna be able to watch 3d again in any other form you know and every time that first unfolding is just gas from the audience we're're like, holy shit, this is possible. I think it's interesting that re-watching it and I re-watched it flat, I will say for this episode because I want to be able

to judge it on merits, knowing how most people will end up re-watching this. In the first 15 minutes of the movie, he does a lot of shit coming out at the screen at you tricks. He gets those out of the system. He understands that there's going to be a novelty

factor that everyone enjoys. Right. People have glasses on. They want to understand why. The first image of the movie is the needle poking through the button, right? Yeah. And that shit pokes all the way fucking out. It's like theme park movie, like, holy shit, this is attacking me. The introduction of YB is him

riding the bike right into frame. And then isn't it like workers carrying a is attacking me the introduction of yb is him riding the bike right into and then isn't it like workers carrying a rug or something all of this shit he's doing all of that and that like minute 15 the tunnel unfurls and he's like no this is about depth it's not about me throwing things out at you it's about pulling you deeper and deeper in i remember both with this and the whole language changes language changes of the movie. Right. I thought... Was that My Bloody Valentine movie? There were a few horror movies that had done the kind of like, a pickaxe flies at your

face thing. And it was this and Avatar where I was like, oh, I see. It's like that the world has texture. I've never seen that deployed. That makes so much more sense. Or that seems like a less gimmicky use of the technology. The sets when you go into the other world are so fucking deep it's the exact opposite it's so cool with a stop motion

yeah the seltzer sets are their sets these are things right yeah but it's the exact opposite of what jd was talking about with the opening sets where the sets are then humongous when he's shooting this stereoscopically you're feeling the empty space around them. You know? So the shift, and I still think it works visually watching the film flat. Yeah. He uses, obviously, the color palettes

and the contrast between the two worlds. That still works flat. But even, I think, visually, you do sense how much more claustrophobic the rooms feel in the beginning and obviously he desaturates the color a little bit yeah he does other stuff too coralline is basically the only character in her world at the beginning who has color everyone else

is desaturated is muted is earthy she's got a bright yellow raincoat and bright blue hair and then she goes into a world where suddenly everything has as much color as she does, but also she can finally fucking breathe, you know? I really didn't pick up on it, though. Yeah. And I think that's what's so strange, when it's 2D, you don't know. You know, we have a saying in our family, use sports, don't let sports use you.

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Why not? Look, if you want to make a little extra cash, and who doesn't need that these days, maybe your home could be the way to make it happen. Find out how at Airbnb.com. Would you say, though, with the 2D version, there is this sort of noticeable visual quality that's just slightly off and I can't really encapsulate what I'm seeing. The best I could explain it is it feels almost like the movie is choppy or buffering okay so yeah does that make sense yeah okay you watch it on your phone without wi-fi as well was that a problem i was outside

of the mcdonald's right and just kind of so one of the things that i will i i won't say more than this is that i've i know a a group of, I'll say a handful of people that worked on Coraline or Jason to Coraline. And so they have been a little bit of my resource, especially for this episode of trying to sort of reach out

and be like, hey, what was this? So one of the things last night I was watching that I was texting about was I was like noticing that exact thing where I was like,

so in animation there's you can animate on what's called ones twos threes fours that's every frame talked about this right well yeah yeah so stop motion you're always going to animate on ones right just because like you're doing all this work just animate on ones yeah it's uh uh hand-drawn animation ends up doing more like twos and stuff like that because it's more work to do a frame versus in stop motion, you're like, I'm here anyways. I'll just do the extra movement for whatever. In hand-drawn, you're going to have to redraw the entire thing versus stop motion.

You're making one adjustment. Exactly. But there's moments in Coraline where I was like, oh, it looks like that's on twos or threes. What's going on there? So there's some things that are purposely chosen for that.

So all the ghosts are animated in fours. Yes. And there's CG creations in some. Okay. Dossier disagrees with you, but okay. Go on.

I believe that they are computer composited. But I don't believe that they are CG unless I have a... Apparently there is one fully CG sequence, which is the ghost children

coming into her dream to warm her. Oh, interesting. He says the backgrounds there are pure CG. Because Paranorman has CGI ghosts, and it's a lot more apparent. Like, they choose to make almost all of the ghosts in that CG, and you can tell that it's CG approximating, whereas here it does feel like CGI effects applied to actual models.

They do some CG cleanup too. Yes, so in Coraline what they did is they did a lot of computer compositing of as many live action elements as possible. Maybe that is one CG sequence, but... That's the only fully CG. The rule of thumb for Selleck on this, from what I've gleaned,

was everything has to have at least some sort of piece of live action. Not live action, but like real, actual. Something has to be happening in front of a lens. Something has to be photographed at some point. And so what you're noticing there, Ben, I was like, why is that happening at the time? I was texting a person that was like what was and what i think is going on is that's artifacts from digital time remapping that they would do interesting so basically when you are doing stop motion in a show a movie like this right they have like every shot being animated

like so somewhat simultaneously just because it takes so much time. So they'll have like 30 stages going at once where a bunch of stuff is happening. And so you can't really go back and do retakes if you get into post somewhere and you're like, I don't really like that. But what you can do is you can digitally remove frames or lengthen frames or blend frames together to tweak the timing if there's something that's a little off. So there's a handful of times where I noticed that in shots, and I think that was because they did some digital time remapping for the animation. But I noticed it, that you're talking about, where there's moments where you're like,

oh, it looks choppy, but it created this interesting... They did it in a way where it does feel very tactile, though. Now, can I throw out a couple other points while we're in this area? With stop motion, you're either doing a face replacement or you're creating a puppet with an animated face, right? Or a manipulable face, right? So, for example, in Nightmare, Jack Skellington is all head replacement, right?

He has these extreme expressions. You can see the behind-the-scenes photos where they just have, like, a shelf of a thousand Jack Skellington facial expressions, but also every in-between mouth shape for any type of word he would need to say and all of that, which used to just have to be crafted by hand with people sort of figuring out these are the transitional stages we'd need and all of that. A character in Nightmare, like Dr. Finkelstein or Oogie Boogie, have these wide mouths with bigger lips, and those are puppets where they're actually just animating the lips' movement with one set model rather than pulling off a head, replacing it with a new head, new head, new head, new head, new head. A big thing that Leica pioneered was using 3D printing so that they could animate.

And this is particularly helpful with lip sync if you're doing dialogue and things have to be incredibly precise in their timing. That you can record the audio with the actors. Then you can animate just the facial expressions on a computer. And then it can print out sequentially the individual framed faces. So it gives them a lot more flexibility in that area. I think also the puppet, you could pull pieces of the face off and change it. They did top and bottom.

There's a little less intense. There's a slit that essentially runs across the eyes, and it's two pieces that they can pull off and replace and combine in different ways. And this movie, by and large, with exception of, I know it's one or two, Babinski maybe feels like they kept them in. They'll digitally remove the seam

lines. Now, because we just saw Wendell and Wild two days ago, and then I was digging into interviews with Selick. In that movie, they keep the seam line on the face. Yeah. Right? Which I think is the move. And he said it's because he feels like so many of the things that Laika

pioneered in this film, that they've now pushed further in their following films and have been adopted by the medium at large and the industries at large have made stop motion too smooth, too clean. Right, it almost looks like computer generated. Too much digital touch-up, too much

exacting sort of polish that he was like, on Wendell and Wilde, I'm going to keep all the seams on their faces for every character and Wendell and Wilde was animated on twos. Interesting. He was like, I want it to be herky-jerkier. I wonder to some degree, and

I believe everything you're saying, GD, but I also wonder to some degree, and I believe everything you're saying, GD, but I also wonder to some degree, A, how much some of the herky-jerkiness comes out of growing pains of the 3D face printing, which 3D printing itself is in a much different state at that point in time than we are right now in precision, and B, how much Selick wants to continue to own some of the things that remind you that the thing is made by hands. You know, he seems adverse to cleaning up things too much. Well, it makes sense, which I love because it makes you think about the fact that this was built. Well, that's why I think, honestly, in a lot of these movies, those final post-credits moments are like the most

breathtaking moments of all the movies where you, they you know they are every stop-motion movie now like at the end you'll see a moment where it includes the animators or the rigs they love to pull back or like that uh uh you like the box trolls has it where it's like an all-day photo where you see time lapse yeah time lapse there you go yeah yeah my takeaway from watching this visually i'm like how do people do this yeah it's incredible it looks so beautiful yeah like especially um the uh the outside the surroundings around the house oh my. The miniatures that they built. Look, I'm glad they did this for me. This is how I always feel. It makes me happy. Yes. But I don't know.

It seems like a lot of... It's sort of like, oh, you shouldn't have. Like someone makes you a nice meal and you're like, this is too much trouble for me. One of the details I love, so the special edition DVD has all these special features that they're making of. They're worth watching because it blows your mind the work they went into it.

One of the things I love is all of their fog effects. Fog and fire is in like fog, fire, wind, steam. The natural elements. Water. That's usually stuff that people will be like, we're just going to use CG

for this. Sure. It's just going to be easier. What they did in Coraline is they actually handmade all of their fog assets using actual

like smoke machines. So they would shoot on black fabric all these smoke effects to be like, oh, YB moves backwards. So, all right, we'll blow some smoke back there. And then they composited those all in together. It was really, really beautiful. Fire, they hand drew all the fire

and then composited that. But it almost seems like they were like, we did all that and maybe we've realized like you can, it might be worth saving the time on some things. uncomposed but it almost seems like they were like we did all that and maybe we've realized like you can it might be worth saving the time on something yeah but in a certain way that makes this movie like a real key transition point in the medium yeah um here's another insane uh little factoid um they hire a woman specifically to make all the sweaters and knitwear? Yes. Which are truly knit. They're not like fabric sweaters approximating knitting as a pattern.

They are actually knit by hand. And the fact is that the knitting needle she had to use to knit the tiny sweaters were the size of human hairs. Okay. So that's very small i don't want to do that fine detail you're fucking working in there not her but the lead wardrobe of deborah cook was really amazing too because they built all these wardrobes for all of these like these it's 10 it's absolutely because everyone has multiple clothing chains which often doesn't happen most stop-motion films you watch characters have one look

that persists throughout the entire film. Maybe Jack Skellington has two looks, three looks. And there's a woman, Suzanne Moulton, that they hired that did all the hair effects. This is one of the first

stop motion films ever where every individual hair was animatable. So they would lay down every single hair and then pair it with wire as well. So that's why, if you watch the shots where Coraline moves her head and her hair moves with her as well. So that's why if you watch the shots

where Coraline moves her head and her hair moves with her, that's so much work. This is what I'm saying. I'm glad they did it for me. I like it. I appreciate it. You seem to be getting stressed out.

It's stressful. I don't know if you should have done this much work for me. Well, we know they did it for David because they have a title up front. For you, David Sims. Well, actually because they have a title up front for you david sims well they have the title actually they have the title at the end oh it's like the et ride every every movie they have the title they have the title at the end that's uh lets us know it's for david

wait yeah that's a little joke for the coralline heads it says for those in the know jerk wad that's good there you go go. You roasted me. I remember someone, I think it was on, what's the movie where it was like clockwork? I think it's Corpse Bride. It was a kind of clockwork stuff inside. Oh, yes. It's mechanics inside the hell. And I remember reading some interview with an animator

where he was like, I would like have nightmares that I was clockwork and of like people's heads opening. And I was just like, I don't know if we should be doing this to people. Yeah, also that, I mean, that technique was bad right that was maybe whatever this is the thing you make so few of these things it's trial and error on every one of them practically right yeah you have to invent entire new ways to do stuff right like this movie is responding to that movie in which all the characters kind of look botoxed yeah and you can see select being

like let's bring faces back in I just can't help but think about sneezing when I see this stuff oh you mean like you just knock Coraline over it must be so stressful you can't like

a cold season you can't report for work that's part of why they will have often times individual animators working alone

so like it's not like a team it's like one person doing a sequence because they're just like that seems stressful too like least room for error no one's bumping it's like it's like one person and then if you sneeze you're just like laying on the ground like they're in the behind the scenes feature out there like like it's like uh two animators working on one sequence

two different characters and they're like yeah so our sequence is uh seven seconds and they're like it'll take us probably like four and a half weeks to animate it and they're like yeah so our sequence is seven seconds and they're like it'll take us probably like four and a half weeks to animate it and you're just like and then they show the clip and it's like just like someone being like here take some and you're like not even it's probably the first half of here exactly yeah

it's wild lordy also imagine trying to animate to the music music's so lovely in this film. But imagine stop motion animating to lip sync of music. And Selleck makes everything more complicated for himself. He wants as much movement and frame. He wants camera movements.

He wants all these things. It's incredible. Okay, so. We got to get into it. We got to talk. We got to talk. Let's talk about the opening of this film. 2007 when Beowulf comes out.

Wait a second. This has nothing to do with it. Okay. It does. I like it. It's like, great. Let's talk about Coraline. Okay.

So Beowulf. So Beowulf. 2007. Beowulf comes out November 2007. This movie comes out February 2009. Correct. So it's about 18 months later, a little under.

They played a trailer for coralline before beowulf because they needed to announce like call their shot there are more 3d movies coming and the trailer before beowulf as i remember it was just this opening credit sequence basically with some different intertitles that's all it was because that was probably all they had animated at that point in time yeah um and that feeling when it just said like and now a sneak preview of a movie coming 2009 and then the first image you see is the needle going through the button right it was the most exciting like statement promise for the future and plus it's like for nerds like us it's like sellex out of jail baby yeah you know like and like we're not

as plugged into all these projects that are happening i don't think i knew about this movie no i i think about i i was following it closely yeah yeah i think about uh erlich in our crushing tiger hidden dragon episode busy getting laid erlich was busy getting laid probably good for him okay i don't know you were saying you were busy yeah i don't know it's college right i was getting laid yeah i'd had sex like two times at that point uh er like, which episode? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon talks about like the first title of that movie with the opening strings of the score

and being like, has any movie ever proclaimed itself a masterpiece faster? I'm just doing it. I think Coraline is in that conversation with just like the look of the first opening like Laika presents in this sort of like stitch tapestry

and the score for this movie is so goddamn good. It is. It's lovely. A chorus of French gibberish children speaking nonsense words. Bruno Coulet is the composer. And famously the girl who does the singing girl voice her name in real life was

Coraline. That's wild, considering I've never met anyone with that name. I will also... Okay, I know we just said we're going to start talking about the... We're talking about... The opening sequence,

such good mood setting. Yes. For me, I've watched Coraline because I went to NYU, and NYU often has these like... Well, Coraline is their mascot. They're the Fightin' Coralines. Yeah, we're the Fightin' Coralines. We all have buttons for eyes is what we chant

when we're rooting on our football boys. Right. So, they always have these screenings where it'd be like these director's screenings. Oh, man. There's some very funny stories about disaster screenings of people who brought their films to NYU and it's a bunch of pretentious film kids

that are like, actually. Ripping them to shreds. Yeah. Yeah. So this was one of the first ones. I never, I always feel like I'm not allowed to go to things,

so I never go to things. This was the first one that I was like, I'm going to this. Yeah. I gotta see this. Henry Selick was screening Coraline, not for NYU, but at Regal Union Square,

but NYU. Sure. Letting people go to it. Yeah. So it was not out. It was way before it came out. And there was like maybe only a trailer. So me and all the other animation nerds

were like, we have to go to this. Henry Selick was there. He was introing it. And so we're all sitting at Union Square. Those glasses go on. And again, no one has seen this yet. So when it starts, and it's a room with a lot of animation dorks in it just the the the energy in the room is electric because people are like holy shit

not only is this incredible stop motion that we have not seen right of this caliber with that sort of henry sell quality for a while but also the stereoscopic nature of it and also just like, this is going to be cool because it starts with, all the titles are hand-stitched to start. And then- He's forefronting the handmade quality. Like this opening sequence

is calling your attention to the craft of the way this film was made by showing a tiny model creating something with that level of craft and detail at a tiny scale for them. That's what I was going to say. It is a...

Thematically resonant. It is Babe Ruth calling their shot in that first thing. It is a... Think about this. It is a stop-motion model making a tiny stop-motion character, making a tinier, as detailed stop motion character. It's like work starting two levels

down the rabbit hole and being like, the stop motion character our stop motion character is making is good. The adage of a movie teaches you how to watch it, that is especially true

for good and great films. This sequence is doing that so effectively. A, it is training your brain to pay attention to the craft of how this film is made. Of like knitting and sewing and stitching, being like, hey, we fucking made all this stuff, you idiots. You need to appreciate this. It is weird that it says idiots, though.

Yeah, it's weird. He keeps showing up. The animation stops and Henry Sugg walks on screen and is like idiots listen! Fucking morons. JD's doing

Henry Sugg posture. That's a thing that I wanted to tell you about at some point is that so after that screening I went up and shook Henry Sugg's hand

and was like you know it's so nice to be here and he was like well I thank you very much and it was the first time that I realized that he walked he is a henry like a character yeah and then from that point forward i've had this theory that you know animate not theory it's just obvious animators characters all move like the animator because they came up looking in a mirror at their own movement to try

to figure out how to animate so like my favorite like is like if you look at a nick park interview he like has the same smile as wallace and he does the hand he does the he'll be like i was so excited he'll bring the hand it's like and so every animator if you watch an interview with them you will see their character yes like come to life within them and it's absolutely hilarious and wonderful and like when will vinton is um you know kidnapping uh a damsel right right and lifting him over his head with one hand it looks exactly like a california reason another thing this movie has to do in terms of teaching you how to watch it in this opening sequence is like get you used to 3d knowing that this is going

to be like the first exposure for a lot of audiences and so he's doing more of the in your face kind of tricks yes in this close-up photography but i mean david we we saw avatar again recently so good we released in 4dx yes fucking killer film yep but it finally jumped out to me how much especially in the first 20 20, 30 minutes of that movie before Jake goes into the N'V body, how much Cameron is working with layers in that film. He's always placing multiple screens and panels and things in front of characters. So he's just getting you used to, before you're going to get into the big spectacle, the amount of layers you can create between the frame and the main subject. Right? And this is a movie like, they re-released Jaws in 3D over the summer.

Which, a good movie. Yeah, Jaws was good. Was that a good movie to do in 3D though? This is the thing. So you're like, is this going to be one of these shitty fucking post-production things? And the fact is, Spielberg's natural shooting style is so

perfectly suited for 3d you watch jaws in 3d and you're like it should have been this way the entire time not just the fact that obviously the movie takes place like on the high seas and you have that innate depth and the like infinite horizon behind it and all that sort of shit. But he frames his images in terms of where to draw your attention, you know, and creating natural depth and movement, and the shot timing, that he's not someone who cuts too fast.

But there's that principle of 3D you need to guide the audience's eyes. If you're changing their focus point too often, too rapidly, too wildly, it's another thing that causes a headache or confusion. The lack of orientation. And this is one of those movies where if you watch Coraline Flat,

you're like, what fucking just mastery of shot composition Selick has? And visual storytelling? Because it then becomes like Spielberg-y. Especially because I think he does his camera moves a lot less in this movie than it moves in his other films yes and it's because he understands i i can't overstimulate people yes i think it's it's really well done um also to

spielberg in 3d there is that shot in et where et sticks his finger out and he just keeps it there and sort of like waves it in the audience's face. He does the paddle ball. He does the paddle ball and he throws a bunch of ping-pongs at you. E.T. comes out of the closet dressed as in the wig, but he's also carrying a 2x4 over his shoulder and he's like, E.T. have to do construction.

Right, right. So he swings it around. He's like swinging it out. Trombone. E.T. a trombone Okay, so opening sequence is great And then we go to, they're moving into Yes, the, Coraline, the Joneses Yes

And not the Joneses from that Jon Hamm movie Keeping up with Are moving to Ashland, Oregon This is set in Oregon Yep I guess Shout out to Laika Right, the Pink Palace Apartments.

An old, you know, manse that's been cut up into apartments. And we see a great three-planed image of the big apartment with Bobinski on top and the cat on the sign. So who lives here? You've got the landlady who you never meet. No. And her son Wybie. Grandson. You meet her at the very end.

Do you meet her? That's the end of the film. I guess she is there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wybie's her grandson. You've got Babinski. He's supposed to be like a Chernobyl liquidator, right? Like he's a Russian immigrant. You've got Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible.

French and Saunders. A real recurring... Because Wendell and Wilde has the two nuns. Yes. You obviously have the two aunts, Spiker and Sponge, and James and the Giant Peach. I feel like the witches in Nightmare form a similar thing. He loves the sort of like

two intertwined old ladies. There's the double-faced person in Monkeybone, right? Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, it was funny. There's a couple notes about the movie where I was like, this a real henry selleck character yes is a real henry selleck moment like there's certain because i it's worth noting so neil gaiman wrote the book henry selleck wrote the screenplay yes yes at gaiman's behest gaiman was like you do what you want to do with it

soul credit on yes he does yeah. And he had that script, I mean, they rewrote it many times, but he had that script long before, like, Laika existed. Like,

you know, he was, that was like his thing and obviously, there were talks of being live action. Yeah. It could have been a lot of things.

So, Coraline is the coolest character in the history of cinema. She's got blue hair and a raincoat. I think she's so fucking cool. Yes. Like,

somewhere around, like, I wish I was friends with this person when I was 10 and we could have like adventures. You know what I mean? Can I also just quickly call out? I guess I'm kind of a Wybie in a way because Wybie clearly just wants to be her pal.

You're a Wybie. Yeah. The two movers. You're a Wybie, okay? Okay. I'm a, well, I guess there's no one in this room. I'm the cat, okay? That's the coolest character.

The two movers. Yeah. Are modeled after the Ramft brothers. Oh, that's cute. Jerome um the two movers yeah are modeled after the ramped brothers oh that's cute jerome ramped who's still alive but this is selleck's tribute to joe ramped who's the one who who takes the shitty tip and sort of gives the like the look to camera yeah um but yeah ramped had died a couple years before this this is selleck's first movie since he passed who had obviously worked on his previous films absolutely and a legend i just want to mention that it's a very sweet tribute.

But yes, okay. So Coraline, coolest girl in the universe. Using a stick as a dousing rod. Yeah, that's the other thing. Why don't you love that? Well, because it, again, so I'm a little infected

because I reread the book in anticipation of this. And so the book is so lovely because it's more just about this girl who's, it's very Totoro when the kids find the lovely because it's more just about this girl who's, it's very Totoro when the kids find the new house and they're just sort of like wandering around. That's like, the book is just this young girl who's like, I'm going to go explore.

I'm exploring, I'm a kid. Yeah. See, I love the dowsing rod thing because I did that when I was a kid. It's that kid concept of like, sort of very basic magic. Right. Where like, I my one of my parents

told me like yeah this is you know some folkloric idea right you get one of these sticks and you can find water and i was like well i can get a stick right like i mean i don't need you know this is not complicated witchcraft over here so i would do that but i guess it you know it's it feels like a very kid thing to do it's a good story too because she finds the water and so it works. She finds the well and that sort of alerts you to like maybe mystery is afoot here. And the well is within a whatever fairy circle. The other thing is that the score's going

and you're like, all right, we're in a mysterious land right now. Because the opening credits score is the like fully gothic thing. And then it goes into this choir. Whimsical. But like what's so jarring is that she's got these parents who are regular right and have like a flip phone and a car aggressively you know like and like dress like normal people right and like the dad's on a computer they're so distracted yeah which which i love to be clear but like it's so odd seeing it in stop motion because you're like this is a fantasy world i don't understand like

i've never seen anything like everything's so drab and earthy and quiet and i i just remember you know this is one of those movies where i think much like you jd you're just like i want this to fucking work i want to be out of jail i I want him to have a win. I was so nervous for this movie where I was like, I want it to be good and I want it to be a hit and I want people to like it, right? And the first visual reveal of the father,

when they cut to the reverse shot, because you're seeing him from behind and then you just see the world's most tired-looking puppet. The whole cast is phenomenal. Yes, I agree. Even like someone like Dakota Fanning is

remarkable. Incredible. Terry Hatcher is the one where you're like that's such a funny moment where it's like, oh, she was sort of famous because of Desperate Housewives again and it's like, is that why she got the role? And you're like, oh, do I take her seriously? And she's so good. She's so good.

Because it's the dual role too. Yes, yes. She is the true dual role. It's this interesting thing with animation because it takes so long that especially a big studio animation.

Desperate Housewives is hot in 2004, 5, 6. You know, that's when it's like at its hottest. Especially a big studio animation, I think you see this a lot with DreamWorks

where they are very star driven and want to load up their cast. Part of the casting process is trying to guess who's going to be a big star in four years. So DreamWorks will often cast a lot of comedy actors who are popping in supporting roles, who they would predict, maybe by the time this movie comes out, they're a bigger name. There's this guessing game. And when this movie gets announced, there's this guessing game and when this movie gets announced and it's like the cast is dakota fanning terry hatcher and the guy from the apple commercials right you're sort of like are they gonna have a film that comes out four years from now the entire cast is dated by the time this

movie comes out it's the year after dakota has done secret life of bees she's sort of in her weird transitional right like teen grown-up terry hatcher was cast when desperate housewives was at its peak i mean by the time this movie comes out yeah but it's no longer cultural juggernaut right i think the mac campaign is like wrapping up at this point in time it is this thing and then it's like everyone is fucking phenomenal in this cast was canceled deadwood was canceled yes everyone was was cancelled. Yes, everyone was cast at a peak point, going against what they would tell you to do, and you're like,

is this going to be like Damaged Stars? And everyone's fucking great in it. I think Hodgman's performance is so good. It's kind of key to the whole movie. Because I think, and Terry Hatcher as well, I think both of them, they ground the film so much

because they are the script of the parents is mean yes the parents are kind of mean yes sure which again the book they're not as mean i don't think in the movie they're mean they're distracted two thousands people you know what i mean but they're also pretty dismissive of coralline and like you know you it puts you in coraline's headspace where you're like, maybe I would want to be away from, you know, but, but I think Terry Hatcher and John Hodgman both do such an amazing job

of grounding those characters to something that still feels like there's love within, and John Hodgman especially. They're just distracted and overworked. That's what I was going to say. And like their kid is like, you know, pay attention to me and they're like oh my god

the way I explain it to Nelly is it feels like it's a Wednesday it feels like it's the middle of the week Jesus Carl we're moving can't you fucking spend 45 minutes just hanging out on yourself just the relief I felt when they cut to his face and then Hodgman's voice comes out of the

puppet and everyone in the audience every adult laughs. Like a real laugh. Not like a one-liner laugh, but this laugh of recognition of, I know exactly who this guy is and I know exactly how he feels right now. And I think every adult relates in a different way to a kid who's

just like, oh, right, this is when my parents depressed me or bummed me out or bore me. But they're playing it so real. And I think it's such good casting and I think Hodgman andry hatcher do such a good job and john hodgman he brings his life like you care for the the father in a way that is really particular yeah he's goofy and boring and all of these things together and there's this lightness to him it's funny because he's someone too who again you're like oh the guy from the Mac commercials.

Yeah. But I think anytime I've seen him being given a role that has a there there to it. Like I really liked him in Mozart in the

Jungle and his little side thing there and like there's He's one of those guys where I'm like I'd love to see him in more stuff. He can really really

really bring like He's very self deprecating about his acting abilities. I think he always says like I'd love to see him in more stuff he can really really really bring like he's very self-deprecating about his acting abilities I think he always says like I don't really know what I'm doing and people pay me to do this and I'll show up and I'll do the one thing I can do but as someone who has worked with him he is an incredibly skilled actor his sort of self-effacing quality is not put on like on set he'd be like I don't know what i'm doing but you're a real actor and i'd be like you're fucking good you know what you're doing he's a very very skilled performer but this is pretty early in the run of people actually giving him stuff to do i mean we talked about in our fucking evil dead episode but he has such a bizarre path to becoming a performer

and this is one of the first times that someone's giving him real meat outside of sort of just doing the Hodgman comedy persona. And Terry Hatcher also. Again, I think it's such a nuanced performance. I agree. And both of them,

my gosh, their other performances. Yes. Yes. The alterations to their voice that they do, I really think this is really good. And Dakota Fanning is,

she is so young when she's doing this. Yeah, but she was one of those kid actors who just had such crazy poise. So poised. I think usually it's the thing with her is like, oh, this six-year-old is talking like a 37-year-old. In this movie, she feels like such an 11-year-old.

Right, she feels absolutely, yes, just like a kid with two. This is just such a relatable kid. She's an uptown girl, one could call her. She feels absolutely yes. Just like a kid with some two. This is just such a relatable kid. She's an uptown girl, one could call her. She is. She was in a movie called Uptown Girl. Yeah. That's true. That's true about her. She was living in a downtown

world. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, it's funny because this is right. She is I mean, this is the same year as New Moon. Yeah, wild. Which she's probably like 18 at the point that it's coming out. Animation takes so long that she's been working on this for years. You know, she probably has a whole goddamn career.

She gets cast when she's 11 and comes out when she's 15 probably. Yeah. Okay, so we meet Wybie. He shows up on a dirt bike. Wyborn. His name is Wyborn. Kind of a mean name. It's mean His name is Wyborn. Kind of mean name. It's mean,

and she immediately like fucking finds the bruise and pokes it of just like, why were you born, bitch? She really...

That was a weird line that Selleck put in there, too. It does feel like classic 10, 11-year-old thing. Exact delivery I just gave it. That kind of like, well, boys and girls are at war with each other.

We need to kind of be like ribbing each other at all times because we're enemies in the great battle of childhood. Funny thing with like Coraline is so bored and she's so annoyed that she's bored. Yes. That she moved to the shitty town, that her friends aren't there. And this should be good. She has a new friend. That her parents aren't paying attention.

And the second a new friend shows up, she's like, hey, fuck you. I'm not interested. I have friends. They're not here. and so i don't need you yeah and also why me is he's annoying like i love him but he does kind of have that vibe of like i don't know i was just hanging out i'm like no you're not you're like want to be friends like yeah too vulnerable how to express it it's like uncomfortable why born that's you know it's tough it's tough that he's called why born he's's very cute. That actor, Robert Bailey Jr., is on For All Mankind now.

He's still hanging out. Still working. Jaboukie Youngwhite, the great comedian, tweeted... One of the great tweeters of all time. Yes. One of his least antagonistic tweets of all time. He tweeted, I don't think that animated movies should be remade in live action.

Except I should play Wyborn? Yes. And now whenever I watch the movie I'm just like, fuck yeah. I want to make it clear. Never ever remake Coraline. It is funny how much she looks like this character. They should remake Coraline in live action. Did you guys have any things that bullied you name-wise?

I've mentioned Save-It-Dims which someone hit me with when I was 11. I've talked about this on the podcast. I went through my fucking entire childhood and I certainly got picked on. I went through my fucking entire childhood. I certainly got picked on. No one ever... You had to have been picked on. Yeah, of course.

Yes, obviously. Obviously. No one ever fucking cracked Sniffin' Poomin', which was right there. Whoa. I identified it at like 19. Literally. You know, Sniffin' Poomin'.

I don't know. It feels just a little too clever. No one ever threw that at me. I feel like you were dishing them out. Definitely. I got a lot of like, you know, Davy Crockett, right? That was just like still a thing you would call any David back when. Yeah, sure.

Davy Crockett. Yeah, anyway, Wyvorn, he's fun. And he has found a little doll, rag doll, that looks like Coraline with button eyes. How funny. What a quinkity. So he gives it to her. It's sort of the only interesting thing that's happened to her. I do like that the dad's... She's like dolls. Sure, she's getting a little old for dolls, but I do like

that the dad is like, I don't know, go count the windows? I'm like, come on, guy. That's going to take her like two minutes. Although there are a lot of windows in the pink palace yeah they include it in the movie but the book it's also make a list of everything that's blue

which I love yeah that is fine I mean I get the it's just when the dad says windows I'm like man you moved here without a plan huh like you have an only child you're moving to this place and like all you've got for her is Windows? Maybe buy her a Super Nintendo.

I have to... Imagine if that's the movie, it's just she plays Super Nintendo for an hour and a half. I have to just read this quickly. Recently, a fit of insomnia, whatever, I was texting you throughout this. I decided one night in a fit of mania

to create a master list of every video game tie-in video game for a movie we've covered on this podcast and this does have a tie-in video this does yes this does so i never played it i was looking to see because i was like i i got i was thinking about getting it to see i got a ds recently i've been playing ds games which i missed that whole era um and i was like is the the Coraline DS game worth playing? And I looked up the AV Club review, and I just want to read the opening paragraph of this because it's exactly what we just talked about. When Coraline's father tells her to count everything blue in the house, viewers of the stop motion movie

Coraline can clearly feel the pain of being a bored, neglected child. But when you're asked to perform the same time- task as part of the core line game you have to wonder whether you have better things to do that's savage then you go to the other world which is playing a different game this film does end in a what you know video game fans

call a fetch quest right where she has to go find the hidden items and that's how she's going to defeat the big boss so I can see someone watching this and being She has to go find the hidden items and that's how she's going to defeat the big boss. A great final boss. Yes. So I can see someone watching this and being like, I feel like this could be a video game. They even have an NPC that's like, congrats, you got one.

There's three left. This is the end, basically, of the era where if you're making an animated film and you don't have a tie-in video game, you don't exist. It is perfunctory. It is assigned to you. No matter what, something has to come out.

And when I saw Coraline, I was like like i wish i could be counting the stuff that's blue this game just sounds like it's a series of mini games and they're mostly the games of when she's in the real world um but i would yes if i'm the game designer there's a whole level where you're walking on that stick and you're trying to balance if i'm the fucking game designer and someone's like well she has to count the windows in the movie should we do that in the game i'd be like i know we can skip let's have something maybe she fights a monster or something cool i feel like that game designer has like 10 ip games he has to finish that week that is the reality he's like what she counts stuff great yeah sure that's an hour anyone else anyone else would just be like i don't know she has to like pick up coins and reality of it. He's like, what, she counts stuff? Great! Yeah, sure! God, that's an hour! Anyone else

would just be like, I don't know, she has to, like, pick up coins and break blocks. Who gives a shit? I mean, it's a big part of the movie is she goes around and collects coins. I watch the YouTube of the game. It actually looks alright, not the DS version, but, like, the Wii version or whatever. And the whole voice cast did it, which is... Yeah, and it's...

You're walking around the house, you know, it's alright. PS2, Wii, and DS. I'm still probably gonna fucking buy you're, you're walking around the house. Yeah. I don't know. It's all right. PS2, Wii and DS. I'm still probably going to fucking buy it. I would have made Bobinsky playable. That guy's fun. Well, I just want like a fucking Bobinsky, like Call of Duty game.

Wait, Call of Duty? Yeah, he's like in Chernobyl. I want like Bobinsky's first person fighter. It's, it's Call of Duty, but with his bare fists.

Like him training his mouses and shit, you know? Like you do a sequence game game and then you get him to do a little dance. If they did like an Elden Ring style game with Coraline where you can just like explore the lands between other, that'd be good.

It's funny you mentioned that, JD. This is your first time recording in our new studio. We have our offices here at Blank Check Productions. Yeah, this is really nice. I'm looking around and I'm seeing... Did you clock this too? Wall, ceiling, floors. We're talking about

counting windows. There's no windows in here. There's no windows in here. But there's one, two, three... I guess, does that count? Yeah. There's three in whatever this is. But it's a really nice space. I mean, there's... Look, there's the front door to the hallway of the building.

Then there's the door for a bathroom. And then I. The closet door. And then there's. There is that weird, it's the little. What do you guys put in there? We didn't put anything there. I mean, we just moved in here.

No, it came with the space. Yeah, it's so small. It was just kind of painted over. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there is a key that they left for it. I don't know. For this little tiny door? Yeah, for the little tiny door. Yeah, and you're pointing to it, of course. It's right there.

It's right there. Anyway, so Coraline's bored and she's like counting. No, no. I mean... Wait, JD, what are you doing? What? Wait. Okay, you're turning the latch. Okay. Oh, yeah. I didn't know I was going through the door Well of course, you're clearly the one with the body built

Pass through Crawling through a tiny passageway Why would I The one built like a child Volunteer for this And the one who knows what's happening through that door as well. But, okay. Okay, I'll do it. No, no, no.

You want to do it? Really? I'm going to do it. Okay, I'll do it gladly. Here I go. Jeannie, what's going on in there? Hey, Jeannie, what's up? Wow, what's going on in there? Hey, JD, what's up? Wow, there's another podcast studio in here. Oh, my God. Are they recording?

It seems like they are. Let me see if I can listen in. Yeah, let's not interfere. I won't interfere. But let's see if we can eavesdrop a little bit. Is there, like, an other podcast guest? Yes. Okay, hold up your mic.

Other David, yes, I know you grew up in England. We all know. Okay, so let's just do the bit. What? No ding-dong bell? No bit? Huh. I guess in this other world, it's not a big deal,

and you're just allowed to own your own childhood, and no one makes a big joke out of it. That's good for you, other David. Oh, and other Griffin. Um, I was reading other deadline this morning. Congratulations. Apparently on season seven of the tick. That's cool. And I guess you're, you're about to start filming draft day nine, the Chronicles of Rick.

I like this other place. This is good. Uh, but to answer your question. right you're absolutely right that is not my voice singing the other father song that is the voice of john linell of they might be giants uh who wrote that song and what happened was the day before i went into laika to record day before, I had a call from the wonderful director, Henry Selleck, asking me, oh, I forgot to ask, do you know how to do a Michigan accent, specifically an upper peninsula Michigan accent? And also, do you know how to sing? And as for the first part, I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about, no. And as for the second part, singing, I was like,

sort of. And it was very nice, and he let me sing the song and we recorded it and I did my best, but it did not surprise me at all. Uh, when I saw the movie in the theater that I did not hear my voice and instead heard John Linnell's voice and it did not bother me. sounded better. It's his song. And John Linnell and John Flansburg are both my heroes. And I thought it was kind of an honor to share a stop motion doll body with They Might Be Giants for however long that song was. But, you know, I do sing the song quite a bit in the shower, trying to get it right finally, I guess. And we're here in this kind of alternate other universe that you call it. So would it make any sense for me to sing my, my other version, the, the,

the other version of the song from the other father? Would that be cool? Yeah. I'll take your eerie unblinking silence, um, as a yes. Okay. Uh,

one and a two and you know what to do. Making up a song about Coraline. She's a peach. She's a doll. She's a friend of mine. She's as cute as a button in the eyes of anyone who ever laid eyes on Coraline. When she comes around exploring, mom and I will never,

ever make it boring. Our eyes will be on Coraline. When she comes around exploring, mom and I will never, ever make it boring. Our eyes will be on Coraline. Fart. I said fart at the end there to indicate that this was clearly parody and therefore fair use. So you can't be sued. So, wow. Well, you know, that felt great. I tried to put a little other father spin on it there. I don't know. You know, John Linnell's amazing, but that felt good to me. It was kind of a dream come true. I like this place. I'm glad I found that little weird door hidden behind those stacks of author's copies of Vacationland and Medallion Status available in paperback, and crawled through it here. Maybe I should stay here. What do you think? You all seem to be nodding silently. Hey, um, other Ben, why are you coming at my face now with that huge needle and that very unsanitary-looking thread?

What is it, buttons? Buttons for eyes? Uh, no, thank you. No, I mean it. No, please, no. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, a saying in our family, use sports, don't let sports use you. Hi, it's Jeff Merrick from 32 Thoughts to Podcast. Are you a sports parent, rep sports, travel sports, whatever you call it?

If you're like me, you know that one of the great joys of having your kid or kids play sports is travel. You know, our families use sports to see different parts of the world, meet new people, and stay in a number of different places. Recently, we've started using Airbnb. The kids love it because it feels like a sleepover at a new friend's house, while my wife and I enjoy more space, a proper bed, and mostly a washing machine. That really comes in handy for baseball trips. Trust me. In fact, it was on a baseball trip last summer when my wife sent me a text after the first night saying, do you think we could do this? Look, if you've ever stayed at an Airbnb,

you've probably wondered the same thing. Could our place be an Airbnb? And now that our kids have also discovered the joys of skiing, in addition to travel hockey and travel baseball, we're on the move even more. Well, our house just sits there. Why not make a little extra money to cover some costs, right? We have friends who travel south every winter and they Airbnb their place. Why not? Look, if you want to make a little extra cash, and who doesn't need that these days, maybe your home could be the way to make it happen. Find out how at Airbnb.com. All right, so we're 10 minutes into the movie.

She pretty quickly discovers this door. It happens very early in the film, which I like. I'm back, right? Yeah, you're canonically back. Yeah, well, the mouse leads it to her. Right. Right. And she meets in this other world.

Peeling wallpaper. She finds the little door. She cracks it open. The tunnel unfurls. The tunnel's very cool. Okay, the tunnel. The language of cinema has changed forever. Yes.

The next thing that I want to point out. Number one, I love the other performances. John Hodgman has this sort of southern draw. Ooh, I can't really do it. This folksy. It's a funny... How are they going to make this guy fun?

With the mom, you get it that she's nurturing and she's attentive. She's making her kid food. It's all this stuff. Whatever. You can tell that the mom in the real world is like, can we just order takeout? I'm busy. I'm just order takeout i'm busy i'm distracted like for two people who write about plants all day you sure hate dirt like it's this thing of like what you do is boring and you don't even like it when i can find a kid of like this is it this is what anyway but hodgman uh like his other version right is this kind of like sort of how do you describe, like loopy sort of showman?

But it is this weird. It's like sort of swinger dad. Yeah, I like that he's not like. He's got this Bing Crosby energy. Yeah, but he's not like some like cool sunglasses wearing. No, but it's like smoking jacket pipe. Hot dad.

He reminds me of the dad of like, you go to a friend's house and it's the dad who you're like, ooh, that dad's fun. No, so he's got this incredible piano with giant mechanical hands that come out, reach out into the audience. What's better than a white glove puppet hand

thing? He sings a song about how great his daughter is. How cool she is. She's a pal of his. Let's talk about this for a second. The one place where it is not our friend John Hodgman, it is instead John Linnell. John Linnell of They Might Be Giants. Yes.

Flansburg and Linnell did, I believe, like 12 songs. Yes. This at one point was going to be a full-on musical, which is interesting because there is a Coraline stage musical that I believe premieres in New York City the same year as this. Like, there are two Coraline musicals that are completely separate going on,

but this was going to be, yes, a full, like, 12-song musical. And I think it is such a shame that that full They Might Be Giants version of the music for this never saw the light of day. That this is the only thing left over is this one song.

You have the song that the French and Saunders did. Did they not do that song? No, I think this is just, I think this is it. thing left over is this one song you have the song that uh the french and saunders did did they not do that song no i think this is just i think this is it there's the one other musical number in the movie when she sees them perform uh sure i don't know if that is uh what is that what is that that's nelly jean what's the song called oh sure um because yeah the only thing john linell wrote is the other father's song which he performs yes um the point is there's a whole they might be giants like this was there's like a they might be

giants songs throughout yes right they they wrote 10 songs we need those songs i mean at the very least like release it as a fucking album it's been over a decade give us the like sense that he was like this movie is melancholy i want this chor choral, you know, score and all that. It makes total, and this is a movie about a lonely girl. Right. It fits that vibe. But I guess I get what you're saying of just like, I'd like to hear the music. Yes.

If they just happen to show up online somewhere. Because I'm sure they're owned by whoever. I don't know. That shit always comes down to how contracts were. I would just love if that snuck out into the world. Wouldn't that be so fun to get? Does Chili T own that album now? He might actually.

He just privately records over it. Can I just read a quick quote here from Selick that is it's from Portland Monthly. An article called Hollywood Nights from February 2009

talking about the inception of Laika. Selleck's talking about how much they supported him and his vision. He says, Coraline was a huge risk, but these days in animation, the safest bet is to take a risk. That's nicely put. That's nice. Isn't that nice?

Of course, it is the kind of thing Henry Selleck would say when he's trying to get you to fund his movie. I've thought about it, and this is actually the safest move for you. But anyway. Here's how I would describe Otherfather. He's the kind of dad who listens to They Might Be Giants. Yeah, sure. It's a perfect fit. Perfect for a

pre-teen kid. Yes. Like a teenage kid might think like, oh, dad, you're being, you know, you're being all showy and silly. But you talk about like, what does she want out of her dad? Attention.

She wants attention out of her parents. Right. When she first goes into her dad's office, he's on the computer. He doesn't even fucking turn around to look at her. His eyes are fixed to the screen. He's mope. He's depressed.

He's got bad posture. You know, his skin is like fucking melting off his face. This dad turns around immediately. He fucking sings about how cool she is. You know? He makes her feel special.

I will say, one of my favorite lines is, so, she meets her other parents who then create this huge dinner for her. Yes.

And it's raining. They got button eyes. Yes. They do have button eyes, but they also have mango like smoothies or whatever for her. But I love that

the first thing they offer to her is they're like let's go play tag outside in the rain. Yes. Her parents are like ooh let's go play tag in the rain

which is like I think that's such a wonderful little detail of like to a kid their dream is that their parents want to go play tag

even though it's raining outside. Because when you're a kid, it's like, can I do this? And they're like, no. Why not? Because it's raining. Because that's dangerous. Because it's dinner time. Stupid kid.

Because you're going to attract mud. Because it's illegal. You'll be arrested. Because you can't push me down, Benjamin. That's not nice to do to people. When my daughter's like, I want that knife. And I'm like, you can't have the knife you're a toddler and she's understandably is like i want the knife like there's no good you said yes to me for most of the things in my life i wish to walk around

the house knife was her first word right knife knife uh that would be uh just disturbing but it leads to my favorite line of one of my favorite favorite lines of John Hodgman's in this is he goes, we love mud here. It is an amazing line. Like other fathers, like we love mud, as if it's like,

that's like, we love mud in this world. Hell yeah. I love it. Obviously, also her neighbors are more fun in the parallel world, but I guess we don't really grapple with them

until later. She doesn't meet them until she comes back. So she goes to sleep right now, which, by the way, this is a moment where I had a very celic character. She goes into her other bedroom

and all the toys are alive. Yes. And there's the one octopus that goes, what's shaking, baby? And I'm like, that's the most celic character. It's very, yeah.

I think in every movie there's like some little sort of like crass side character. It's the bone daddy yeah centipede saxophone player character just like it says a little thing that you're like get out of here someone who's like a 30s gangster yeah exactly i could tell though that there's the lobster face guy in monkey bones as soon as she goes to bed and they watch her sleep that ain't right no i know

it's supposed to be like oh isn't that sweet they're being so nurturing i'm like uh-uh no there is something not right about that you don't like your toys watching you well that my parents would button eyes watch well i was gonna say that's another thing that's not right about them is that they have buttons for eyes yes yeah she's sort of skirting past that it's such a good like when you're someone like Gaiman trying to write a modern-day fairy tale, which is a hard task because you have had centuries. It's one of the oldest storytelling forms. Yeah. And one that really persists to this day, right?

Like, the classic fairy tales have a stickiness that a lot of other works from those eras do not. And relevance in our current culture hard to come up with a new concept that someone has not already tapped into because they sort of so thoroughly mind the primal fears and desires of a of a child you know button eyes is such a fucking good idea there's something so upsetting about it like and the notion of the stitching something that looks close enough to an eye but is dead and feels upsetting to think about being

actually permanently affixed to your face and when they introduce those to her later it's like one of the scariest lines when other fathers like needles show so sharp you won't feel it I also like black is customary yeah like but then they're like but you know you can have another color if you want is it that makes it better so she wakes up in real life i like the idea that it's like she's getting a taste of it

yes like this is how the other mother is getting her like you just give you a little bit which you know most of these wizard of oz type stories we talk about once they go into the place they stay there yeah maybe they jump out one time, you know? There's something interesting about the fact that this is really about her maintaining, like, this dual life for a good chunk of the running time. But when she goes back the second time, she meets other YB

who is mute. Right. We also meet Bobinski. Well, when she wakes up, she meets Bobinski. Real Bobinski, which is great. His animation is stellar. I was going to say, it's the example of, you're introduced to him, what, hanging upside down on his hands, flexing,

and he's the guy where I'm like, I can't wait to see how this fucking guy moves. He's like Jack Skellington with a big old beer belly. He's like Jack Skellington with the mirror on his legs. He's like a little ball of mashed potatoes with toothpicks sticking out. And he has a line that I love, which is, again, in the

book as well, it's like the moment that's chilling, where he's like, he comes back and he's like, oh, the mice want me to tell you, don't go inside that little door. She's getting warnings of like, don't do this. And you're like, oh, Bobinsky's sort of this guy that's a little out there and thinks and then when when the mice are like telling her things that are real then you're like oh whoa he's fucking the only adult paying attention

on the way right because he doesn't he doesn't even he's like who knows what it means then sure but spink enforceable the the ladies who i love as well they're more like they do have insight but it's like they don't even know they're like and then they give her a peep stone later you know where they're like they actually are smart yes but they're they're so dotty you wouldn't even know it and they're so obsessed with their past it's about I mean it's why

Coraline fantasizes about them being able to fucking unwrap and reveal into young girls of themselves also Spink's cheeks. So Spink is the short one. With the cheeks that wobble. It's just such good animation. I love her dogs. Yeah, and Forcible, how would you

describe Forcible? I would say... What on her is notable and moves a lot? What feels like it was definitely designed for 3D. Like almost the most protruding element. Yes. Forcible is a stack.

Oh, wait, here. I'm looking down at my notes. It says the titties, question mark? Ticklebitties. Yeah. And she also has the. It's bonkers that this is the design. It's such a funny design, though.

I think it's so funny. For a kid's movie, though. I mean, I know this is of a certain age. Well, that's interesting. I wonder what they were like wild uh yeah i'm sure but like is it like they're burlesque performers is this like a little not appropriate i think the best kids but that's what's fun about this movie is kind of like on that edge a little i think i think it's a thing we've lost i don't know how i feel about this

people are getting it's that thing when you're a kid where you really zero in on someone's like some physical attribute of an adult in a way that's inappropriate and like how kids will be like pointing something out that they shouldn't. You know, like you don't have, you know, you're missing a leg or you have one eye or so, you know, that you're not supposed to talk about or whatever. She can't get past the cheeks and the boobs. Yes. So like everyone in this movie is excited.

But the same Bobinski, he's got the giant belly and everything else. The dogs are so great too. The idea of knitting the angel wings for the dog that's still alive because she's just like, well, he's going to die. There's a select thing to creating models

of characters that defy physics. Yes. When things are hand-drawn or CGI, you don't think about it as much because it's not an actual weighted object existing in the world. Right. But things are hand-drawn or CGI, you don't think about it as much because it's not an actual weighted object existing in the world. Right. But when you look at these dogs and you're like, they could not stand up. The

disproportionate relationship of their head and their jowls to the rest of their bodies. Yeah, forceful being in a wheelchair. Yes. She would not be okay. Yes. No, I think she'd be fine. What do you mean? Totally normal. No, and that's all cool. And then she goes back to the other world.

She meets Wybie again, who is mute. Yes. She meets the cat in her second trip. Well, the cat's been walking around. I know, but he speaks to her, I believe. And it's the same cat. He is moving between the worlds. This is not an other cat.

He's the one who sees it. Only in the other world can he speak with the beautiful sonorous tones of Keith David. Always a good... Yes, great. We also, well, so we go to the other world, and that's when we have the garden sequence. Garden sequence, very cool.

Which the garden sequence is one of the great animated sequences. I mean, the reveal of the garden sequence is one of the the great animated sequences i mean the reveal of the garden of her face in the shape of her face right yeah can i say that i think the mouse sequence is even better yes because that's the one where i'm like these are two showstoppers lord how much effort did this take there's a reason they make that the sort of pull back the curtain thing at the end of the credits. Yes. I will say I. Because it looks like a fucking zoetrope. Yeah.

And in 3D. The synchronization of it and all that. Yeah. In 3D, the garden is incredible. Yes. Because you're seeing all of these things moving. In 2D, it's good. But in 3D, it was, I remember just feeling like a pure dreamlike happiness in the theater being like, this is what it feels like to be within joy.

It's another thing, too, where Selick understands the most effective way to use 3D is to know when to withhold it. Yeah. So, like, making the opening more flat so that it will really, really call your attention to it when she goes into the other world. And similarly, that sequence, you haven't had a lot of things protruding out at you. I just remember there's sort of the perspective shift

as you go to the overhead shot. Yeah. But also, while that's happening, all the sort of flora starts acting up. It's all moving and sprouting. It does the nightmare

unfurling moment where you're like, oh, right. Incredible. Like stunning, gaspy stuff. They also establish in a very funny way uh you know the big robotic grasshopper that the dad drives and you're like well this won't turn evil

later for sure right but it's also so funny because it's like what do my parents do they're like concerned with like agriculture you know like but in the world's most boring way, they don't even like dirt. They just look at computer screens and write shit all day. And it's like, if my parents are going to have a job like this, I want to be riding a giant mechanical praying mantis grasshopper. Yeah. Like digging around, making a flower bed in the shape of my face. Exactly. Yeah.

We also have dinner where we get another great John Hodgson line. I love dinner breakfast food. I mean, a classic kid fantasy, or it's sometimes a reality, but right? What does a kid love more than breakfast or dinner, right? Exactly. I don't know. Reese's for breakfast, I would say, maybe. Other Wybie and Other Bobinsky.

And up with Other Bobinsky is where we see all these, again, very Henry Selleck little machines. Yes. That have the like, beep, boop, beep. There's a bunch of that. It reminds me of all the Christmas Town stuff. Yes, yes. Where they're all sort of clockwork. Where it's like these little clockwork machines that like, and like cotton candy comes out and all this stuff.

And then, yes, the mouse circus, which I mean, what a feat of stop motion. It's hundreds of characters. It's him knowing like, am I ever going to get this budget again? Is the studio going to shut down after one movie? They had to individually 3D print every one of those frames of every one of those mice. How do you make them jump?

It must be annoying. They put, I mean, you CGI out the metal. But it's absolutely insane. That's cheating. I'm out on this movie. F. They cheated. You gotta make it jump itself.

Yeah. All of your Atlantic reviews have gotten very weird when you've been judging them based on whether they're real or not. F. My review just stops. I'm like like wait a second They faked this The filmmakers clearly thought I wouldn't recognize this man

As Mr. Tom Hanks from previous films It's not Otto at all You're reviewing movies now Like you're Mystery Inc So on her third visit Is obviously when it turns malevolent When they're like, you know, you can stay here forever. I also, we have the moment where we go into real life town that I really like.

Because we get against some very celic characters. He always has to have street musicians at some point. Love them. He also, a very celic thing is the weird stop motion character that crosses in front of, like. Okay. Like, there's a a lady that like waddles across

and I'm like that's every Henry Sly movie has some weird like waddling foreground character that it's like they're just like to some animator like

I don't know make this fun for three seconds which I absolutely love and breaking animation news Hayao's Miyazaki's new film is basically done

wow that's cool so it'll probably come out next year hopefully at least maybe in Japan news, Hayao Miyazaki's new film is basically done. Wow. That's cool. It'll probably come out next year. Hopefully. At least maybe in Japan. Anyway. Apparently it took them one minute per month of animation is what they say. I know. Wow.

So anyway, what else happens in Korra? Oh yeah, that's when things turn sour. Then she goes back. That's when she meets the cat. That's when we get the forceful spink performance. Yeah. That is like...

Doesn't she get trapped in the mirror in between those two things? That's when she meets the ghost. Yes. Yes. And they are like the rag doll in her eyes.

Yes. It's after the dinner for breakfast, I think. Yes. I mean, look, it doesn't matter. It's fine the dinner for breakfast, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it doesn't matter. It's fine.

People have been seeing the movie. But this character does not exist solely in relation to her. This is the Beldam. It's Beldam. She's the Beldam. But she has trapped and snared children before. This is what she sort of preys upon is the lack of fulfillment in children's lives, assuming the role of the parent they wish they had

until she lures them in and out. There are these three ghost children. So, Coraline is going to be trapped. And then her parents get kidnapped. Her parents are gone. And she escapes from the mirror world. Yes. Exactly.

And so that's when she proposes the game of, like, let me try and find the items. We also see this forcible and spink performance. Yes, which is very, very, very, very unnerving and cool. And that's the moment when it's like... Them unzipping themselves is brilliant selling shit. And even Coraline's like, she's like naked practically. Right.

That's like a line Coraline has for the audience. That's another thing that I remember getting like a huge cathartic laugh from all the grownups in the audience when Coraline calls out like, should we be seeing this? Already you're like I cannot believe they're putting boobs this big in an animated film

in 3D and then she comes out wearing pasties. Is this for kids? Now she's like almost topless. That's when you have the sequence where they're pulling the levers and changing the sets which is such incredible sort of like once again just like 3D

fucking show-off shit where you're like changing the... Yeah. It's so good. Now, I think this is a five-star movie. I love this movie.

Yeah. I do think the fetch quest is maybe the least interesting part just because it feels like the movie's like, okay. There has to be.

She has to do this. We're running out of time anyway. I agree with you. I think they do it pretty quickly. They do it quickly. That's the thing.

And also, the thing. And I also, the thing I'll defend most about it is that you've at least set up within the movie this character becoming very skilled at creating games for herself. Yes. In order to keep herself occupied. The only child thing.

Where you're like, this is the special skill. This is the wax on, wax off moment. Yeah, it's so crucial to kids' stories that she's got a clever way out of it. Right. What does she specifically train for that she never even realizes

is her greatest asset? Yeah. Right. And I think it's the main thing of the book. So the book has a lot less plot stuff going on. And so when she's given the rock with the hole in it, that's like, what's that for? And then this fetch quest

is sort of like the only thing. Yeah, sure. And so I think it's harder in this one because there's other stuff going on. So then you're like,

oh, a new thing? This like fetch quest? Yeah, and again, it just, they take care of it quickly because it needs to be done quickly. Exactly. Which is fine.

Man, I also love the moment of Coraline going around with the cat and realizing that the artifice of the environment. The world is limited. The way that's done, the way that's all visualized, there's so much in there that is so nuanced. And I don't know, you can draw so much from that

in so many different ways. Different people can really read into that in different ways. I think it's brilliant. And I love that they use a lot of the the illustrator tata hero usegi like his style of those sort of like viney kind of things like it feels very of his style that when things start disappearing and turning away like i, I like that aesthetic. It's different. It's the thing I love about Laika is they really embrace a symmetrical design, which so much of animation is symmetrical, round, balanced. Do we like the other mother's arachnid monster form? Yeah, pretty cool. The thing I love about it is,

much like Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach. It turns you all the way on? Yeah, step on me. Okay, your face. Spider other mother. Just see if it brought a Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach. It turns you all the way on? Yeah, step on me. Okay, your face. Spider other mother. Just see, brought a Miss Spider. No, what are you? J.D. Amato now has 50% stake in Blank Check Media?

No, I think, once again, it's a character design that allows Selick to strip away the stop-motion puppets to their essence. A lot of this form of other mother, especially her hands and stuff, feels like he's actually just using the underlying armature of right especially when these puppets you've got her skeleton hand right yeah at the end they're pretty cool and her sort of fracture it's needly ceramic yeah yeah and like even like the sets start you know all the colors going away and they start it's like it's like the stop-motion universe is becoming unveiled

to be a fake stop-motion universe yes which is the story and going back to the opening of the film yeah where we're seeing yes um yes i also want to point out that terry hatcher followed this up with great voice work in planes and planes fire and rescue what's the name of her character dotty great um yeah yeah she i also like the big bug uh armoire thing yeah yeah i also think it's cool i love that house becomes more insect bug like yes ish i i love a good fake out ending yeah well of course she does defeat the bell dam she uh you know rescues her parents she's back home and it feels genuine it does and it is kind of genuine like she mostly has accomplished and i i love the you know, rescues her parents. She's back home. And it feels genuine. It does. And it is kind of genuine. Like, she mostly has accomplished her goal.

And I love the, you know, them being covered in the snow, being like, what are you talking about? We just got home. Nothing weird has happened. And she's like, there's snow on you. I know there's tangible proof that this really happened.

It wasn't a dream. It's so satisfying as a kid, that ending, where you're like, I'm the only one who knows that something weird happened. But there's the evidence, the physical evidence

that this wasn't in my head. There's the little thing, whatever it is. Yeah. They're like, you're like, was it a dream? And then you, like, open your hand and there's the evidence, the physical evidence that this wasn't in my head. There's the little thing, whatever it is. Yeah. They're like, was it a dream? And then you open your hand and there's a magic coin in it

and you're like, I guess not. Which is the opposite of from Time Bandits to End, which is like the most like... Remind me, I haven't seen Time Bandits since I was 10 years old.

You know what, JD? I brought up the end of Time Bandits in the James and the Giant Peach episode. I feel like that ending is very influential on Selick and I was, I came short of saying the I feel like that ending is very influential on Selick. And I was, I came short of saying the ending just because the ending is so insane

that I don't want to ruin it even for a 30 plus year old movie. Check out Time Bandits. And also we have, you know, another episode to record. So we don't need to talk about Time Bandits too much. But I genuinely feel like

even for an old film. What's this door? Five more minutes? What's this door? What's this TB door? Does it go to Tampa Bay? Sorry. Oh, it's a call with a star of time bandits.

But yes, the ghosts show up. I do like that the ghosts are now happy little angels, not creepy ghosts. And they're like, thanks for saving us, but you do need to deal with her. This isn't resolved. Yeah, right. She's still a whole thing. She's still hoping.

She's like, good, we're all safe. And then at one point they're like, no, really, we're okay. Which I like when ghosts are like, yeah, we're good. You're still, you're in trouble. Which is cursed. You have it. She'll stop at nothing to get it again.

She will come for you again. It makes death this sort of thing where you're like, oh, that seems nice. Well, you're still alive, so best of luck. But that's their thing, too. They're like, hey, the good news is you're still alive. So that's great. You're not out of trouble, but you're alive.

That's the good news. But she does successfully fend off the hand and destroy the key with the help of good little Wybie on his motorcycle and his cool mask. Okay, here's my one. I think I keep doing this. But like what I like in the book is that Coraline comes up with a plan to kill the hand. And in here, she seems like she's like,

doesn't really totally have a plan and it's like why be has a moment yeah sure but she's had a lot of hero moments already but what i like in the book is she like has this moment of like i'm gonna take this on myself i knew you're gonna delight but no you're just you're you're inviting it by being like i know i keep talking about the book i feel like i'm usually that guy on the podcast. I'm enjoying not having David Raz me for comparing shit. The book, it was all written down on a piece of paper. There's no way we have any of that. All right, let's talk about 3D TV technology.

Oh, fuck no. We're not doing that. He's talked about his 3D TV quite a lot over the years, I will say. By he, I mean Griff. It's still the thing that is the biggest red flag about Griff. He still has a 3D TV. A 3D TV. You mean like he invites a lady home and they see the 3D goggles?

But also when he's with his therapist and he's like, hey, I think we've made a lot of progress. Maybe we can. And the therapist is like, tell me, do you still have your 3D TV? And he's like, yeah. And they're like, great, I'll see you on Tuesday. I'll see you on Tuesday. I'll see you on Tuesday. And actually, the rate's going up.

Yeah. You know what I like? What? Thanks for asking. Just that the final thing is that nice little party. And it's that Coraline is like, invite everyone. Because even though they're weird, I want to see them. Well, this is one of the things

that is nice about the way the character changes, right? She starts out the way being like, this town fucking sucks. I keep on looking at this photo of my two best friends who I can't see anymore, and I miss them. And I do like whenever they come to life, and they're like, we miss you! Right.

In the photo. And she's like, I'm so fucking bored and lonely. And it's like coralline you've moved into the world's weirdest neighborhood everyone in your immediate vicinity is fascinating and she's like fuck off and by the end she realizes like oh i'm like lucky that i get to have this odd childhood surrounded by the world's most bizarre grown-ups well i think that's the thing too is that obviously this story... Fucking bring Babinski over. In its form, the base of the story

is about an internal... Yes. Change, right? But what I like about the ending, especially here in the movie, right, at the end, is that when you bring those characters in, it also makes her change external, right? So she's also come to realize

that all these people who she thinks are like boring or weird or whatever actually probably have these rich inner lives and rich pasts to them like you know she hasn't changed them on a superficial level she should find out who they are right like she now sees bobinski as this person that might be teaching these mice to do these amazing things or the spink and forcible or these crazy old performers. Like, they're not just old people anymore.

And I love an end, you know, Labyrinth is like my favorite ending where it's like, oh, all the characters come back and have a party at the end.

And it's nice, isn't it? Just to have the characters be like, great, we made it to the end of the movie, let's have a party. Like, it's such a nice, fun, every movie should end that way.

Yeah. You can't name a movie that I don't think would be better would be worse if all the characters the end came together at a party all of them come together I was gonna say there will be blood yeah exactly just some of your everyone's dead there will be fun let's party and I've got milkshakes for

everyone Ronnie Dangerfield pulls the cover off the golf bag and reveals a stereo system. Why didn't you say so? Somebody's getting laid tonight. Wait, why is he shotgunning? He's trying to do Daniel Plainfield. I don't know. Yeah, you know what else more movies should do?

They should have 26 individual posters for every letter of the alphabet. Heard a character poster. Did you ever hear of letter posters? They got one for every one. Every letter. Some of them are stretches. My child's bedroom will have every one of those posters on it.

Focus Features releases this film. Z for Zanzibar Chocolate Beetles. Look, they had to really stretch for some of these. It's an independent animation studio. Y is for Yum because she eats food. really stretch for some of this. It's an independent animation studio. Why is 4 Yum? Because she eats food? Potentially the future of this entire medium rests on the success of this movie. Not,

you know, to mention the success of this man being able to make another film ever again. This director. And Focus is releasing it. Not even Big Universal. So it's a specialty independent arm of a studio releasing a kids movie in the winter.

They had to get very creative in how they marketed this movie. Well, why don't we play the box office game where we can talk about what a success that was. Look, success is not ultimately defined solely through box office. For someone who is obsessed with the box office,

I've certainly come around to the victories if the movie exists out in the world. And if they got away with it, they somehow got the money to make their vision. Right, right, right. And we're better for it culturally. But the relief I felt seeing this movie opening weekend and having it play well with an audience

that was sold out, doing well the first weekend, and then fucking multiplying well. Yeah, it dropped 12% in its second weekend. It had very good staying power. You're like, this keeps Laika in business for 20 years. This gives Selick another movie, even if it took fucking 13 years to make.

It's just net positive for the culture that this movie was successful. And as long as Michael Jordan brand is still pumping out the dollars, we're not worried about that box office. This movie also is so against the trends of animation at the time. Like I really think I was worried it was going to be seen as dorky or quaint. We have talked about though how,

we've mentioned how like the five Oscar nominees this year are up, which wins best picture nominee as well, obviously. Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Princess and the Frog, and Secret of Kells. It's this like great, obviously. Coraline, Mr. Fox, Princess and the Frog, and Secret of Kells. It's this great...

It looks like you just got disturbance in the force. Both Ponyo and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs don't make it in. Is this one of the best animation years? I think it's almost indisputable. I think it is the one ever.

And it's like this sort of broad... Every other lineup has one stinker in it, I would argue. You usually look at any category, any animation grouping from the Oscars since they started, and there's one movie where you're like, they had to round out the three or the five. I'm just saying, is there a year that has had more...

No, when you consider that the two things fucking left off the list are Cloudy and Ponyo. Yeah, like, I want... Obviously, I would have Ponyo in there, and I would probably kick out Up. I would too. People think we're fucking rude to Up, but we all have the same opinion, which is like,

it's better than most movies and not as good as most Pixar movies. And Cloudy is a very cute movie. Is there an animation year that has Fantastic Mr. Fox? I don't know. I mean, probably not. It's hard to... Coraline? No.

Two stop motion features came out Fantastic Mr. Fox. I don't know. I mean, probably not. It's hard to... Coraline? No. I mean... No. I meant two stop motion features came out in the same year. Yes. Yeah, it's very cool. And from like different studios. Like there's a diversity in every sense. It's a great lineup.

And this film made $75 million domestically and $126 worldwide. Very, very robust numbers. Yes yes um it opened however i will say also i looked when it came out on dvd and that dvd was a red and blue uh uh you know later they packaged this disc in with 3d tvs to incentivize people to buy it right i'm not i have the one the red and blue one uh first week it did 20. First week, it did $20 million in DVD sales. It's a thing that Selick always talks about where they cap stop-motion budgets.

They'll never give them the same amount of money that they do CGI films or even hand-drawn films. And there's sort of a ceiling to how they can perform at the box office, but they linger for a long time. And I think Coraline has been a really consistent performer. And you still fucking see you know merch constant blu-ray releases um yeah it's a highly profitable film that has kept like

in business but it opens number three at the box office with 16 million dollars behind well number one is a new entry okay It's a comedy An ensemble comedy Ensemble comedy, February 2009 Yeah, it's sort of Valentine's themed Is it Valentine's Day? Is it number 10? Number one Number one at the box office

2009 It's new this week, $27 million opening It's based on a book that's based He's just not that into you on a phrase he's just not that into you this is gonna be the one box office game where i feel like i have a shot oh yeah sure sure because this is when i was in college yes did you see ken quapus is quapus quapus who can say quapus ken quapus is he's just not that i don't think i did because you know there's that section this is the episode where ron livingston I don't think I did. Because, you know, there's that sex in this episode where Ron Livingston,

I think it's Miranda's like, oh, the guy, he won't call me back, blah, blah, blah. What's going on? What's the game? And he's just like, he's just not that into you.

And they treat it like it's like the mystic knowledge of men. He hosted a daytime talk show off of the success of that. It is what, like, that's a deal breaker is making fun of in 30 Rock. Exactly.

That he just built a cottage industry out of this. Bad movie, in my opinion. But it's sort of got that ensemble thing of like, that's a deal breaker is making fun of in 30 Rock. Right, exactly. That he just built a cottage industry out of this movie. Bad movie, in my opinion. But it's sort of got that ensemble thing of like, well, maybe you like this storyline better than that storyline. Connelly's kind of great in it. Sure. When's she bad?

Never. When is she bad? Never. Jennifer Goodwin is sort of like the, like, soft star of it. It was sort of this moment of like, oh, is Jennifer Goodwin? She's on Big Love. Like, is she about to be like America's next rom-com sweetie pie gets caught up in

once upon a time for a decade. What's this little door? Justin Long, uh, adding another character to his stable of a horror movie icons. Yeah, seriously. Yeah.

Um, so that's number one at the box office. Number two is an action film that came out last week and surprised by doing quite well, making $24 million. But perhaps even more surprising is that it's dipping only 17% for an action film. A fairly junky, cheap action film that no one saw coming as a big hit. I know what it is. I'm going to text it to David. I want to see if J.D. can guess.

I know you know what it is. I know. I know you know it. Oh, no. We it to David. I want to see if JD can guess. I know you know what it is. I know. I know you know what it is. Oh, no. We talked about it many times on these box office games. And it's sequels. Because it's an action movie that's being dumped. Super Bowl weekend.

Truly dumped. The worst weekend to release a movie for guys. And it overperforms that weekend. And then holds so strong the second weekend. It becomes a phenomenon. Oh, no. What is it? And launches a franchise.

It drops 17% this weekend. It drops 8% the next weekend. I'll say this. It becomes a franchise. Yes. It fully mints this actor as an action star. Yes.

Which he was not prior. And he's older. But was already a major movie star, a serious actor, and he becomes a very unexpected late in life action star. Yes.

What is it? It's Taken. Taken. Taken. Starring Mr. Liam Nees? It's Taken. Taken. Taken. Starring Mr. Liam Neeson, which has made $53 million in two weeks.

Oh my gosh. It also had been released in Europe like two years earlier. Maybe not two years, but had been released. It was readily available online,

and people were like, Fox is dumping this. It's just going to be nothing. And then it exploded. Number three at the box office is Coraline. Great movie. Number four at the box office is also new.

I would say an underperformer. It is a comedy sequel to a comedy remake that was perhaps ill-advised to begin with. Okay. And this is the sequel. JD? Pink Panther? Griffin knows what it is.

Huh? Pink Panther Returns. The Pink Panther Dos. Really? Oh, no. Good job. Did you have a guess? I didn't yet. Okay. I was going to stew on it, but I didn't have an immediate guess. Pink Panther Returns. I wasn't going to get it. Dos. Really? Oh, no. Good job. Did you have a guess? I didn't yet.

Okay. I was going to stew on it, but I didn't have an immediate guess. Pink Panther Returns. Harold's Walt. I got one. We're on the board. I've never seen the Pink Panther.

Please. Steve Martin. Is Cleese in that one? Yes, he is. Cleese replaces Klein as Dreyfus. Yes. Cleese is Dreyfus. You've got Alfred Molina, Andy Garcia, Emily Mortimer.

It looks like they bring in an Indian actress. Yes, Ashiwara Rai. She was in, you know, Bride and Prejudice. Everyone thought she was going to be a huge crossover deal. Yeah, and she's a gorgeous, charming star. Do you know who's the female lead in the first Pink Panther remake?

No one talks about this. I talk about it. Beyonce. Beyonce's in it. Right, because that was the period of time when Austin Powers, Fighting Temptation, she was doing movies. Isn't it so funny that Beyonce was like, Austin Powers, Pink Panther, like truly would not Obsessed. She just did a bunch of movies.

Obsessed, right? And now it's like, would never think of her. Well, now it's like you can't even do an interview with her or whatever. Like she's this sort of like Cleopatra level figure. She made like several mainstream hits.

Not Foxy Cleopatra, real Cleopatra. That would feel beneath her now and then she did like two Oscar play movies, Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records. Cadillac Records, which she's phenomenal in.

Her best performer. And it now feels like she'll probably never do a movie again or if she does, she'll do it in like 20 years and it'll be a big ass deal. Well, she's like deal wasn't she Nala in The Lion King

will she play a role on camera again I don't know I don't know yeah well it's just it's fascinating because it's also people would be like

obviously she does things like Lemonade which are sort of like films in a way like they're visual albums that are almost feature length and she's very

involved on screen it's just funny to me that she you know she made more movies than Whitney Houston but she also never found her bodyguard yes and something like Dreamgirls maybe should have been that for her she's so overshadowed I would always argue that she was like a very capable star

in these mediocre movies and once again it's phenomenal in Cadillac Records but like in Austin Powers she's like quite charming in these mediocre movies. Yes. And once again, it's phenomenal in Cadillac Records. She's great in that. But like in Austin Powers, she's like quite charming. She's like 20 in that movie. 19?

Yeah. She's very funny in that movie. In like, you know, Pink Panther, like she's very cute. I'm sure she gives subtle nuance to her. Number five of the box office, another comedy.

This is back in the day when, you know, fucking winter, you know, crappy comedy central. Yeah. What if a guy had this job? What if this guy had this job? Huh. This is back in the day when, you know, fucking winter, you know, happy comedy central. Yeah. What if a guy had this job?

What if this guy had this job? Huh. Is, um, oh, it's a Paul Blart mall. That's correct. Right. Because January 2009, Paul Blart and Taken, which are both sort of like dumps. Yeah. Like who cares?

Not only become like huge fucking like middle America. Cultural thing. Sensations. But suddenly suddenly like I guess these are our two biggest movie stars yeah Kevin James and Liam Neeson we have to build fucking franchises around these guys how do we sell it also directed Paul Blart correct yeah he did it's a wild type two movies in the top five at the same it's like well he directed the sixth film here uh which is push not based on the novel by Sapphire oh push the push the... Push the sort of vaguely X-Men-y kind of movie, which Dakota Fanning is in, isn't she?

Yes. Yeah. And what is this? Chris Evans. This is right after or right before Jumper. Maybe right after Jumper. I remember there was a series of action films that were based on like a one word magic ability.

Right, because I guess maybe Chris Evans can push people. That's something like that. I don't know. Dakota Fanning, Camilla Bell, Jaimon Honsu. Yeah, Precious. I guess, right, no,

the heroes in Push are called pushers. That's like their designation. Right. Yeah, Precious comes out this fall. But it's playing at Sundance January 09, knowing that this movie's coming out a couple weeks later. And Lionsgate, when they buy it, it's like, you've got to change the title.

Everyone is still going to... The memory, the cultural memory of Push. People are so Push crazy. Six months from now is going to be overwhelming. But yes, so they renamed it. I think Ben is negotiating something with a pizza delivery. It's possible. Feels like this is a tense standoff.

Other films at the box office, you got Slumdog Millionaire and it's sort of carrying on from its Best Picture win. Will never be talked about in this podcast. Right. You've got Gran Torino, which is sort of the big surprise. Gran Torino. You can't not do it. I was going to do it if you weren't

going to do it. Gran Torino. Why don't you come to your senses? But that's the other one. Fucking January, because it goes wide in January. Gran Torino taken. Old men are seeing movies, goddammit. But that's the thing.

Those three movies in January, a dumping ground feels like Hollywood being like, fuck, are we not making movies to like 50 year old men in the Midwest? You've got the mostly forgotten The Uninvited, the American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters directed by the Gard

brothers, who I don't think ever made another movie. And then you have look they said it couldn't be done. They said they couldn't do it. They said those dogs couldn't have a hotel, But they do

Ben's not here to see it Because he's negotiating the release of our pepperoni So that's your top ten in the Coraline week But yes, Coraline does very well Hotels for Dogs, JD Just to remind you famously A movie that made Ben cry Because he was so proud of them for pulling off that hotel

David, just as a film critic at Atlantic, the hotel, is it for dogs or run by dogs? Both. You're asking me that as a film critic for the Atlantic? Yes, because you have an extra sensory ability to perceive and process film. Whether they fail or not. Whether they tricked you.

This hotel isn't for dogs at all. It's just for people and there are dogs in it. F. Cheat. Ben, Hotel for Dogs. How dare you. Hotel for Dogs. A plus. There you go.

Is it for dogs or dogs operate it? Both, man. The dogs work there. Emma Roberts is... What's this little door? You know what? What is that little door? Go on.

It's a door. Go on. Go on. Finish your bet. Okay. What's in the door? Let's see. We might send you in there and you might not come out for another two years.

I don't know. Where's JD? Went into the dog door. I don't know what he's doing. He was looking for a hotel. An interview with a CGI dog. Yes. Can I say two things quickly?

You can. One, additional micro merchandise spotlight. A cool thing about the Laika movies being funded by Phil Knight is that they always do shoes to tie into the movies. I was, I have this up.

Have you looked at what these fucking, David, Google Coraline Nike Dunks. They are so fucking cool. Okay, here we go. And for this one. Ooh, they are cool. They're so fucking cool. Oh my God, yes.

They've got little mice and cat on them. And these were truly, they were so desperate to get attention for this movie knowing that they didn't have the marketing budgets to compare with major studio animated releases, that these basically were only sent out to press to try to garner goodwill for the movie, and they go for

thousands upon thousands of dollars. It looks like in my size right now, I'd have to pay $6,000. Do we think any NBA player ever played a game in Coraline Dunks? Coraline Dunks. Okay, now I'll say, the Paranorman sneakers look like something you could see on an NBA court. Yes, that's what I was looking for. They are my least favorite, design-wise.

They're sort of glowy, they're green. Right. Those are also really expensive. The Missing Link and the Box Trolls ones seem to still maybe be in circulation at reasonable prices cool yeah uh and the kubo ones are really cool but i i advise people to look into these just to stare at them and imagine uh having the disposable income to pay for these things like to stare into the void of capitalism have it stare back look they're nice looking sneakers but none of them are as good as um what's the shoe called in Elizabethtown?

Oh, the fuck, I don't know. Look it up. What's the other thing you wanted to say? Annie Awards. Because I've been doing little Annie. Spice Monica. Oh, well done. That's the Elizabethtown shoe.

I've been doing little Annie Award check-ins on these episodes because it's relevant, right? Okay, sure. We didn't do it on the Nightmare episode, but or we did. No, we did on the James the Giant Peach episode.

The Nightmare episode, it loses to Lion King. The only other film nominee is Batman Mask of Phantasm. Pretty decent three nominees. Agreed. It goes to show how much more limited the... In 2009 2009 the lineup is the same as the oscars but they just added cloudy with a chance of meatballs good where's panya though

they put miyazaki in for director interesting that feels almost more insulting i was gonna say the nightmare year they don't even have a best director category they have best achievement creative supervision which which Selick wins beating out people like Bob Camp, creative director, on Ren and Stimpy. Right.

Bruce Timm, producer on Batman the Animated Series. Sure, sure, sure. Right? We need to be done. I know. This is the final fucking thing I'm saying.

You're doing the Nightmare on Elm Street category. I was filling in a gap. Uh-huh. The voice performance category, which I'm always really interested by. Right.

To be clear, it lost to Up at the Annie. Yeah. Up the fucking one. Up was a big deal. Voice acting. Jennifer Cody wins for Princess and the Frog, which is a surprising winner.

She plays the rival girl. Yeah, that is weird. Yes. A good performance. Sure. Jennifer Lewins is also nominated for Princess and the Frog, who I feel makes a lot more sense as a winner

they nominate one cast member from Coraline Dawn French kind of a weird choice to spotlight her over Saunders but also that's not the one I would pick out of I think Fanning's performance is incredible but then yes I would pick

Terry Hatcher or John Hodgman Fanning and David Hatcher all feel like more obvious nominations or you nominate french and saunders david god bless him you can't nominate him because then you're just nominating him every year for anything he ever did well maybe you give him an honorary spot yeah uh yeah the other nominees were hugh laurie for monsters versus aliens and leguizamo for ice age i want to say three yeah four i think dawn of the dinosaurs oh you're right no that's three. Pete Docter wins for Up, but Miyazaki gets the nomination there. Bomback and Wes Anderson

win screenplay. Yeah, and Coraline not even nominated, which is stupid. But it does win best music for that nice score, and it wins for character design. So that's nice. That's nice. David, I'm trying to end the episode.

What's in this door? Oh, it's all the different types of 3D televisions we can talk about. Let's run through it. All right. Come on. Done. We got to record another episode. This was so fun. It was so fun.

Glad to have you back on the main feed. It's good to be back. And now we have to record another episode. Hey, this might be one of the longest ones, too. Really? Really? I mean, because you had the Hodgman, you had the ads.

Griffin really fucking stretches one of them out. Hodgman's going to do a type 45. He better not stretch them out. I mean, and we've got bits now in this, too. All right, we're done. Now I'm freaking out because we have to do ads. Jesus. All right.

Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Murray Barty for our social media and helping to produce the show. Thank you to AJ Barty for our social media and helping to produce the show. Thank you to AJ McKee and Alex Barron for our editing.

Pat Reynolds, Joe Bone for our artwork. Leigh Montgomery and the Great American Doll for our theme song. JJ Birch for our research. You can go to blankcheckpod.com

for some real nerdy shit. I think JD's responding to the fact that I now have to close my eyes when I'm doing the fucking rundown to make sure I get all the names right.

Like I'm summoning some fucking... Truly it becomes a stressful point in my life. Blank Check Pod links to some real nourishing, including Blank Check Patreon, where a month ago we will have done Talking the Walk, Talking the Moonwalk with JD, which we are recording

about 30 minutes from now. But right now on the main, on the Patreon, we're recording about 30 minutes from now. But right now, on the main, on the Patreon, we're in the middle of Kotze. We're in Kotze town. We're doing the Kotze trilogy. Wow. That's great. I think that's exciting. That's awesome. We just committed to this.

We think it's a good idea. It's a good way to start off the new year. That's what I'm saying. It's on the record, baby. Also, the films that I think the most should be using the Billy Lynn technology. Yes, absolutely. Great argument. Tune in next week for Wendell and Wilde. Yeah.

Selick's newest film. Yeah. Which will be a couple months out. His last film. For now, don't wish any ill upon him. I just mean the end of the miniseries. Sure. The end of this brief little miniseries.

Yeah, and we'll tell you what we're doing next. And as always... What's that door over there? David, why don't you go through this one? David, why don't you go through this one? Yeah, I'm going to go through this door and never come back. What's on the other side? Looks like our lunch.