It’s Burton’s ‘Nightmare,’ but He Called Shots : Movies: Animator Henry Selick directed the picture. And though his name doesn’t come before the title, the opportunity has opened doors.

No one need wonder whose movie is “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” but some moviegoers might be surprised to learn that director Burton didn’t direct it.

Burton was busy making “Batman Returns” when “Nightmare” went into production in San Francisco, so his old pal and fellow former Disney animator Henry Selick was given the top job.

Is Selick a tad resentful that his name seems to have been overshadowed, most especially now that the Touchstone picture is fast becoming a hit?

Not in the slightest, he’ll say--just the opposite.

“(Burton) gave me my shot,” said Selick, 40, who heretofore toiled successfully, if obscurely, making dizzying animated MTV station IDers that have since become the medium’s signature, as well as Ritz Bits and Pillsbury Doughboy commercials to pay the bills.

“ ‘Nightmare’ is Tim’s child,” he said during a recent visit to Los Angeles from his home in scenic Tiburon on the San Francisco Bay. “He conceived the original basic twist on the ‘Grinch Who Stole Christmas.’ It’s his style. His idea. I was there making the movie. He was guiding it . . . spicing it up.”

If mostly by fax and phone.

Burton visited the “Nightmare” set five weekends over the course of its two-plus-year production, begun in the fall of 1990 in a South of Market Street warehouse, a decade after he first sketched out his quirky, slightly twisted story at Disney--and a decade before he became the director of such box-office bonanzas as “Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands” and the “Batman” movies.

Otherwise, Selick said, “Disney gave Tim autonomy and Tim gave me autonomy.”

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Better still for Selick, autonomy was easier to achieve some 330 miles north of Burbank, where over-the-shoulder supervision by studio executives would not complicate his life and assignment--bringing Jack Skellington and his ghoulish Halloweenie puppets to life through stop-motion animation. The eye-crossing, exacting process involves three-dimensional figures that are repositioned ever so subtle between frames of film--there are 24 frames per second of film.

Like Burton, Selick has done a 180 on his assessment of Disney, where he spent his first years out of CalArts, studying under noted “Bambi” and “Fantasia” animator Jules Engel, drawing “foxes, foxes and more foxes” for “The Fox and the Hound” in 1981. Selick’s instincts lay less with those foxes than with the artistically radical animation in the German Expressionist and Canadian Film Board vein that Engel had introduced him to.

“(The then-Disney regime) didn’t mind that we wanted to perform new tricks . . . just as long as they fit into their box. Nobody does animation better than Disney; it’s just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society,” he said. The two actually became friends while taking a night drawing class through Burbank Adult Education “with a lot of blue-haired ladies and some (eyebrows raised) interesting- looking models,” Selick recalled.

To satisfy his creative urges, Selick took an eight-month leave from the studio in 1979 to make a short at the American Film Institute. “Seepage” is a stop-motion story incorporating watercolor animation of two figures--one in profile, the other looking into the camera--sitting around a Bel-Air pool talking. It became a top prize-winner on the animation circuit.

Two years later he left for Northern California--just becoming a mecca for special-effects tekkies, lead by standard-bearer Industrial Light & Magic--and worked on a few features. In the mid-’80s he formed Selick Projects, just as MTV was scouting for state-of-the-outrageous animation for its station identifiers. He purposely went overboard on his first two MTV spots, making them “so dense, so jam-packed, you can stand to see them a whole lot of times.” His famous “Haircut M” campaign that showed an insect-looking creature carving the MTV logo into a red Eraserhead-type hairdo won a Clio.

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Since he’d spent so much of his own money making the mini-films, he still had to pay his bills, leading him into commercial work. He reinvigorated the 28-year-old Pillsbury Doughboy campaign, working for San Francisco’s Colossal Pictures commercial house.

It was when Selick made a six-minute stop-motion film “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions,” sponsored and shown on MTV and first-place winner at the Ottawa Animation Festival in 1992, that “Nightmare” came his way. “Tim got scared (with “Slow Bob’s” success),” Selick said, half-joking. “That’s why he hired me.”

Selick said he and his crew of 120--puppet and prop-makers, set builders, art directors, camera operators, lighting designers, editors and animators--had the freedom to improvise on Burton’s vision, Danny Elfman’s score and Caroline Thompson’s script. Burton himself was involved in the puppet designs, often redrawing or touching up original concepts and faxing back his changes.

One Selick inspiration: how rag-doll heroine Sally adeptly (and bloodlessly) can sew her limbs back on with needle and thread. “Initially, everyone cringed, but it stayed. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.”

Walt Disney chairman Michael Eisner intervened to tone down the scene in which the ominous Cab Calloway-inspired monster Oogie Boogie roughs up the captured Santa, whose Christmas Day trade Jack Skellington tries to usurp. “It was too creepy (for Eisner). We had to make sure Santa wasn’t really hurt and escapes in the end.”

No doubts about how the collaboration has worked. With “Nightmare” still in the Top 5 after five weeks with a box-office gross of $34.5 million, Disney’s fortunes seem to be turning around after a hitless summer; Burton continues to prove “original” and “Hollywood movies” can coincide; and Selick gets another Disney movie to direct. It will be stop motion and live action, based upon Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach,” to begin pre-production in early ’94. Burton will executive produce with Denise De Novi.

But this time, Selick said, “my name will come before the title.”