A ‘Bride’ hitched to King Kong dreams

It took a small army to animate the puppets in Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride,” a love story with a dark twist that opens in Los Angeles on Friday. But what does it take to make a puppet master?

Animation supervisor Anthony Scott and animator Phil Dale both began their love affair with the stop-motion technique, employed in the film, when they were 11 years old -- albeit in different decades and on different continents. They are but two of the two-dozen animators who worked on “Corpse Bride.”

Growing up in Flint, Mich., Scott began making stop-motion films with a Super 8 camera. He was fascinated with the work in the 1933 classic “King Kong,” in Ray Harryhausen’s films such as “Jason and the Argonauts,” as well as in the holiday special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One of his first movies starred his own version of King Kong. “I did take one of my GI Joes and turned it into King Kong by covering it in fur,” says Scott, 42. “I liked to draw when I was little too. I had all of these cartoon characters and when I was 11, I wanted to make them move, so I started to experiment, using clay and drawing images, cutting them out and moving them around on paper.”

Dale, who is 33 and grew up in South London, also started making stop-motion movies with his dad’s Super 8 camera, inspired by children’s programming on the BBC.

“Every school holiday I would do a little film. It was just trial and error,” Dale says. “I got better at it and realized it was something I could do as a job.

“There weren’t a great deal of books when I started out about how these things were done. The greatest thing about stop-motion is that it doesn’t have to be a puppet. You can animate anything,” Dale says.

Though Scott and Dale took a few college courses, neither animator decided to pursue a college degree. “I was a bit naive,” Dale says. “I thought I could go out in the workplace. It took me a while, but I think as long as you persevere and believe in yourself, things eventually turn up.”

Dale’s first job was as a model builder on a British kids’ TV show, “Molly’s Gang.” Eventually, he got a job on the 2001 film “Monkeybone,” which was not a hit but did introduce Dale to several other animators, including Scott.

SCOTT decided to pursue his dreams in California. In 1987, he was hired by the legendary Art Clokey as an animator on “The New Adventures of Gumby.” A year later, Scott teamed with Henry Selick and worked on his MTV and Pillsbury Doughboy spots. His first big movie break was Burton’s 1993 production of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” directed by Selick.

Both Scott and Dale also have worked on computer graphic animation, but prefer stop-motion. “I worked at Pixar for 2 1/2 years,” says Scott. “I think I went back to stop-motion because I enjoyed the process more -- to get more specific, it would probably be the craftsmanship.

“I think when you go to the stop-motion studio, you see all of these different departments, all these different kinds of people. They are like blacksmiths. You have one department making armatures for the puppets. You have another department making clothes to put on the puppet. They are not sitting in front of the computer. They are handcrafting the whole thing.”