Not All Warm and Fuzzy

A few blocks south of Market Street is a warehouse where time stands still--or nearly so. To gain entry, a visitor must step over Herve Villechaize’s handprints on the sidewalk and press an intercom button. A cheery voice says, “Giant peach!” After the magic words are spoken, the door opens, and inside is a Ping-Pong table, a flight of stairs and a passageway.

To find the nearly timeless place, follow the passageway until it runs into a corridor lined with black dropcloths. Behind each dropcloth is a little world full of lights, puppets, a very large peach and a young man or woman in a Zen or zombie state. They are in this condition because they are animating Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story “James and the Giant Peach.”

Although this Disney film, to be released Friday, features actors Paul Terry (as James), Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margoyles, plus the voices of Susan Sarandon, Jane Leeves, Richard Dreyfuss, Simon Callow and David Thewlis and the music of Randy Newman, the real stars are the animators. And the man who directs their “performances” is Henry Selick, a master of stop-motion animation, a low-tech, excruciatingly labor-intensive process in which puppets are moved incrementally, one film frame at a time (a frame being 1/24th of a second), so that they achieve the illusion of life when the film is run at normal speed.

“It’s not the easiest thing you could do with your life,” says Selick, who looks a bit like a graduate student. “It’s probably about as hard as brain surgery and it’s only creating fantasies, but we get a kick out of it.”

This is Selick’s second feature film, having previously applied this technique to Disney’s “Nightmare Before Christmas,” an Edward Gorey-like twist on “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” that was conceived by--and credited to--producer Tim Burton. “Nightmare” was sort of a stop-motion breakthrough, because until then it had been used primarily in shorts, commercials and isolated effects sequences. It was a gamble that grossed Disney about $57 million worldwide.

“James” is a continuation of this masochistic method, although it differs from “Nightmare” in significant ways. While “Nightmare” originated in Burton’s imagination, this movie was adapted from a book known and loved by millions, so it has millions of potential critics, including Dahl’s family. And unlike “Nightmare,” which was all stop motion, “James” is a mixture of stop motion, live action and computer generated imagery (CGI), a much more complex approach that requires the filmmakers to blend different mediums so that they appear to belong in the same world.

Finally, though Selick is quick to point out that a lot of “Nightmare” reflected his tastes and that he and Burton share many of the same sensibilities, “this film stands much more as a representation of my own way of seeing things. Color choices, design choices, sense of rhythm, number of songs. I don’t have quite the constant interest in the macabre.”

Though it is there, as it should be. Dahl, who died in 1990, was very much like the Brothers Grimm in his approach to storytelling. “James,” his first children’s book after a successful career writing macabre adult tales, is no exception. In the first few pages alone, James is orphaned when his parents are eaten by a rhinoceros, and he’s taken in by two aunts who are described as “selfish and lazy and cruel.” For some, this scenario may not conjure up images of Disney, although Selick begs to differ.

“Roald Dahl and Walt Disney share some common ground, and in Disney’s earlier films especially, ‘Pinocchio’ and ‘Snow White’ in particular, there’s great darkness and odds to overcome,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve Disneyfied it too much. Whenever there was a hard decision to make, I tried to be true to Dahl’s sensibility, because it’s closer to my own.”

This hasn’t always been easy, because of the demands of the material. In the story, James is given some magic crocodile tongues, which he accidentally spills at the foot of a peach tree. A giant peach grows, and with it a number of garden-variety insects, including a grasshopper, a centipede, a glow worm, an earthworm, a spider and a ladybug. The peach, with James and his new insect friends inside the hollow pit, breaks off the tree and rolls into the ocean, where they encounter all sorts of adventures on their way to New York.

The rights to the story were controlled by Dahl’s widow, Felicity “Liccy” Dahl. She had many suitors but was won over by “Nightmare.” Selick then had what seemed like an inspired choice for a screenwriter: Dennis Potter, the scabrously funny author of “The Singing Detective.” Unfortunately, says Selick, what Potter came up with “was personalized, which is the way he does everything. He set it in a time and place that meant something to him”--meaning it was set during World War II and featured, among other things, a U boat attacking the peach.

“I would have been happy to go with it,” says Selick, “but I had to respect the fact that Liccy Dahl and Disney felt that it had gotten too far away, that his voice was overpowering Roald Dahl’s voice.”

There followed a fairly agonizing development process in which the project was put on hold for several months while a new script was written. Part of the problem, in Selick’s view, was that they were dealing with Disney’s live-action division rather than the animated division.

“With the live-action folks, the script is everything,” he says. “Animation people know that the storyboards become the blueprint of the film and the script is just a means to the storyboards.” At the same time, he says, Disney President of Production David Vogel, who was very hands-on, “pushed us to get the story to work better and the characters to mean more. You’ll have more to think about when you go home, rather than just a visual feast.”

Another issue was how the material was to be approached. “I know Henry early on wanted the boy to be live action all the way through and to have all the bugs animated,” says producer Brian Rosen. “Then they decided that would be too expensive. In hindsight, I’m not too sure.”

“Well,” says Vogel, “there were a million reasons why we decided not to do that, including the fact that the little boy would have to act the entire second act of the movie by himself. He would never have the animated characters there. He would always have to be making believe. So it wasn’t a matter of money. It was just you don’t do that to an 8-year-old.”

Roughly the first third of the movie is live action, which was shot on enormous sound stages around San Francisco. After James crawls into the peach, he becomes a puppet, thus initiating the stop motion/CGI section, in which the peach floats on the ocean and then is borne aloft like a balloon by a flock of sea gulls. The final sequence features James as a live boy again interacting with the puppets on a sound stage in New York City.

One of the sticking points in this marriage between live action and stop motion was the transition from human James to puppet James. “We needed to be sure that the transition would be magical and credible,” Vogel says. “It was one thing to say, ‘Oh, yeah, cool,’ and another thing to see it on the screen. So we were always looking at it, going, ‘OK, that’s the critical thing to get done.’ ”

While these storytelling issues were being resolved, the puppets presented other challenges. Selick wanted them to look like bugs but act like humans, foregoing what he calls the “Jiminy Cricket route, where he’s basically a little green man.” To that end he enlisted the aid of children’s book illustrator Lane Smith, whose abstract renderings were more or less followed by the designers. For example, the centipede ended up much as Smith had envisioned it, but according to Selick his approach to the grasshopper was “a little too weird, a little too Picasso-esque. It almost looked like it had been in an accident.”

The character is now reminiscent of Dahl himself, right down to his sandals. The hardest creature to design was the spider because, Selick says, “real spiders have no faces. There are mouth parts, fangs and eight eyes.” They went through 40 or 50 designs before coming up with what he describes as “the most rewarding character in terms of visual adaptation.”

And then there’s James. After a handful of shots, Selick decided the puppet didn’t look right, that it “was a little too realistic, like animating a corpse.”

“We fell into a trap where we filmed the live action boy and fell in love with him and his charm,” Rosen says. “I think we were pushing the puppet more and more to look like the live-action boy rather than as a caricature. It wasn’t working because he was too real. It had to be pushed back into the cartoon world.”

“We simplified him, so he became more like the other puppets,” Selick says. “We gave him button eyes, like early Mickey Mouse. The audience will find more emotion in him without all the details. I’d say that was a super-critical change. Without that, the movie wouldn’t work.”

As difficult as all this conceptualizing might seem, it’s dwarfed by the actual physical production. It took them months to get the computer-animated water right. “I wanted it to look like a painting that had come to life, that had some of the physics of water but looked like an illustration,” Selick says. “It was too chrome-like initially. It didn’t have any detail or real scale. Sometimes it looked like animated peanut butter or motor oil. I think we’ve got a good blend.”

More than a dozen puppets were created for each character (they tend to wear out), along with a set of expressions for each one (happy, sad, skeptical, neutral, panic, etc.). More than 50 peaches were built, from three inches to 20 feet in diameter, all of them mottled in exactly the same way. Peach movers were constructed to mimic the up and down motion of the sea. These motions were then plotted to make continuity problems easier for the makers of the computer-animated waves.

Indeed, continuity is the name of the game. When you’re shooting one frame at a time, the smallest anomaly looks huge. Because of that, the studio generates its own electricity to eliminate variances, or “pops.” The spider’s webs were a particular problem because they would expand or contract with fluctuations in air temperature, creating more pops.

Easily the most exacting aspect of the physical production, though, is the animating process. A typical shot lasting from three to five seconds might take three or four days to set up and a week to shoot. Selick directs each performance through a series of tutorials in which the animator, along with the director of photography, a lighting crew member and an art director, goes through a few frames of a particular scene.

“I’m not going to dictate all the poses, but it has to be bigger,” Selick says to one animator. “You need a little more Newtonian physics,” he says to another. “It seems a little mechanical.”

When asked to describe what kind of person can do this, Selick might be describing himself. “Very thoughtful. They’re fairly methodical. They’re all very good actors. The ones who learn to breathe while they work do the best work. It’s like they’ve got a tap from their brains into these creatures.”

When they untap their brains on breaks or at the end of the day, the animators have different ways of dealing with reality. Some ride motorcycles or engage in furious Ping-Pong matches. Some see real people moving in puppet-like increments or find it odd that they can function without a puppeteer assisting them. Selick, who doesn’t do any animating on this film, ran afoul of actress Joanna Lumley when he tried to position her like a puppet while directing the live-action sequences.

Of course, none of this angst is visible on the screen, and what will be there won’t have any of the slickness of a “Toy Story.” Asked if that concerns him, Selick says, “Every day we see examples of these creatures coming to life, and you feel like you can touch them. That’s what still distances me a little from cel animation and a lot of computer animation. It’s fantastic, but it’s still like a flat screen to me. I think there’s more texture to the puppets, and the space they exist in is more real and magical.

“I’ve often thought of a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode where somebody’s working on a Pillsbury Doughboy that’s been around for 30 years always looking perfect while the animator grows old,” he says, smiling. “They can be a little like vampires.”