This Golden Globe nomination is sweet validation for the years of hard work it took to bring Coraline to life using stop-motion animation with the greatest crew of animators, artists, and technicians I've ever been privileged to work with. I share this nomination with all of them and we all share our thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press.

I feel like what we love to do is solve problems. If it's easy to solve, we find a more difficult one. There's always a way. In our world, we can build stuff. We can build more sets than you could ever build in live-action. We can build more props just for custom angles or perspectives. We'll build special trees for that, paint a sky. There's really no limitations, except that you run out of time and money at some point.

I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

I get rewarded virtually every day with something amazing to see - whether it's a new shot, a miniature sweater, someone who's figured out how to make the hair look really great. We found a way to do the rain, finally. And mud. Make the trees. So I get to stay in constant motion as a director, you know, reviewing things. And there's a lot to review.

Miyazaki's films in Japan are bigger than Titanic. He's an incredible rock star there. In the US, they don't do as well.

Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.

I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.