THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 16, 1996 TAG: 9604160027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines
CREATING THAT fuzzy feeling is not as easy as you might think.
After three years and 560 individual shots, the stop-motion animators of ``The Nightmare Before Christmas'' finally have their wildly inventive version of ``James and the Giant Peach'' on the big screen.
The animators of ``James and the Giant Peach'' emerged from their cloistered San Francisco studios recently to talk about just how this ``Peach'' got made. Considering the fact that they have been isolated on 26 different stages, moving puppets gesture-by-gesture for the past three years, they appeared remarkably clear-eyed and not nearly as berserk as one might imagine.
``Part of my job was to convince them not to quit,'' Pete Kozachik, director of photography, said. ``No, it's not nearly as tedious as you might think, although it does take an incredible amount of patience. There are times when we'd lose track of time and go to 3 o'clock in the morning.''
Consider, just for starters, the difficulties of putting on screen a plot like this: James is orphaned at age 9 when his parents are run down by a rampaging rhino. Sent to live with his wicked and greedy aunts Spiker and Sponge, he is lonely and miserable until he meets a mysterious old man who gives him a bag of magical growing things. When he accidentally spills them near a barren peach tree, a peach instantly appears and grows until it reaches 20 feet in diameter.
James crawls inside the peach and sails from England to New York. Inside, he makes friends with Centipede, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glow-worm, Grasshopper and Miss Spider. The trip is threatened by a shark and a band of skeleton pirates before netting a flock of seagulls for an overseas flight.
Now you have to admit, such an adventure would not be within the realm of humans. Author Roald Dahl, who in addition to children's books wrote things like the script for a James Bond film, turned down several offers to film it during his lifetime. (He died at age 74 in 1990). His widow sold the book to Hollywood only after she saw the stop-motion effects in ``The Nightmare Before Christmas'' in 1993 and felt that, at last, the images might be captured.
Kozachik said ``The Seven Voyages of Sinbad,'' featuring some of the most famous stop-motion action scenes, got him hooked on making movies. He was 7 years old, and totally amazed by the cyclops in that film.
``King Kong'' is perhaps the most famous example of stop-motion, even though, the photographer says ``there isn't one shot of that film that would be accepted today. Too jerky.''
``It was a sad day for stop-motion animation when they decided to go with computer images for `Jurassic Park' '' he said, ``but we've proved that perfect fluidity is not really necessary. That means that stop-motion can also work and it was proved in the first feature-length stop-motion film ever tried by a major studio, `The Nightmare Before Christmas.' ''
While ``James and the Giant Peach'' is a Disney film, it was made by the somewhat distant, and different, animators up in San Francisco. It was largely felt that ``Nightmare Before Christmas'' only got made because it was produced by Tim Burton (director of the first ``Batman'' hit) whom the studio wanted to woo into doing other projects for them. ``Nightmare'' did only middling business and got mixed reviews from the critics. Burton ran away to another studio.
``Disney never pushed `Nightmare,' '' Paul Berry, director of animation for ``Peach,'' dared to say. ``They're not turning out any toys or any other merchandise for `Peach.' I think it's a big mistake.''
Some sources think Disney is kissing off ``Peach'' to save its big publicity for the more traditional animation of ``The Hunchback of Notre Dame'' this summer.
The main complaints Henry Selick, director of both ``Nightmare'' and Peach'' heard from the Disney studio was that ``we might be beefing the story up too much. I actually lost sleep over changing the book, but the book is largely episodic and we had to invent things to hold it all together.
``We added the skeleton pirates, who were not in the book, because skeletons look so good in stop-motion. We even gave in to giving Jack Skellington, from `Nightmare,' a cameo appearance. But I think we kept the spirit of Dahl's book. I've asked kids. Lots of them. And none of them had problems with the changes we made from the book.''
Selick added that ``I think Dahl really respected children and their imagination. In his stories, children often win over aggressive adults. He empowers children.''
Fifteen puppets were created for each of the seven main characters. For James himself, 45 different heads create the different expressions.
Miss Spider, who has the voice of Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, had a series of replacement mouths to create the dialogue.
The 12-second scene in which Ladybug kicks up her heels reportedly took six days to complete. Director Selick, though, said that the most difficult scene in the film was the one in which the rhino runs wild.
The film opens with a highly stylized section of muted photography in which actual humans are used. It turns to stop-motion photography only when James enters the giant peach (much as when Dorothy turned to Technicolor when she entered the land of Oz). Computer animation was used to create the mechanical shark and the ocean waves.
The peach itself weighed 2,000 pounds and measured 20 feet in diameter. It was made of foam covered by felt.
A 10-year-old British lad named Paul Terry plays James. Terry began taking acting lessons at age 4 and was dismayed when he didn't get a part as one of the devil children in ``Village of the Damned'' with Christopher Reeve.
Sitting on his mother's lap the day after the film was first screened, Terry said ``I didn't think it really looked like me, at first. The hardest thing about the whole movie was the audition. I had to wait months before I found I had the part. My grandma fainted.''
For the long months in San Francisco, though, he missed England. His dad is a police inspector back in London.
``My grandma was with me, but I missed soccer,'' Terry said. ``Having a tutor on the set is a bit tiring, too. The tutor made me do my lessons when I wasn't in front of the camera.''
``Paul was perfect for the role because he has a mixture of innocence and fearlessness,'' Selick said. ``I'll admit that when I first auditioned him, I thought he might be too much of a cut-up, but then he did a scene and he never looked like he was crushed. Nothing broke his spirit.''
The creators and a few of the ``voices'' for ``Peach'' were gathered at Marina Del Rey, Calif., for an end-of-film celebration, and to share impressions with first-time audiences.
Jane Leeves of the TV series ``Frasier'' is the voice of Ladybug.
``The real joy was to get to play a character this old,'' Leeves said. ``I wouldn't have normally got to play this character for a few years. I had to get an older voice. It wasn't easy.''
David Thewlis, who won the Cannes Film Festival and rave reviews for playing a lowlife seducer in ``Naked,'' claims that playing the Earthworm was more difficult than any role he's had.
``I recorded the lines in a room with no one else there. None of the other performers were there. I had only a few drawings to guess even what they'd look like. The director would just say things like `Sound scared. The sea gulls may kill you' or `You're being tickled. Sound as if someone is tickling your tummy.' It's quite a challenge. Try it some time.''
A giant peach, obviously, can also be a giant problem, but director Selick has no regrets about his finished film. ``It's all worth it when you look up on the screen and the magic works. It still looks like magic to us, even though we've spent three years moving those puppets gesture by gesture.'' ILLUSTRATION: POLYGRAM
THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
[Color Photos]
by CNB