A couple of days ago the front page at CBC (Canadian Broadcasting) website announced that it had interviews and reviews about Tim Burton's Coraline. Which I saw moments before I saw a piece on the Chicago Tribune print edition front page announcing its reviews of Tim Burton's Coraline. And my hackles started rising.
The hackles were, I should point out, not on my behalf, but for Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas: he worked on the story with the screenwriter, Caroline Thompson (another person whose contribution tends to be forgotten), and the songwriter, Danny Elfman, to turn Tim's character sketches and poem into a film script, then he spent years in a warehouse in San Francisco overseeing people moving dolls around a frame at a time, with Tim off making fine movies; and, then, a couple of weeks before the film came out, the title was changed to Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Which tends to mean that people assume that Tim made the film and if they even notice Henry was involved as director, they assume it was in some strange kind of junior role. (Nope, he was the director. He grew Tim's poem and character sketches into a movie. Tim produced it.)
It was irritating when people started asking me why the advertising said "From the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas", and wasn't it some kind of a sneaky attempt to make people think that it was by Tim Burton?, and I would sigh, and say no, it was a sneaky attempt to make people think it was directed by the person who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. (And given that people were saying this about trailers that made a point of saying Henry's name, I had little patience with it.)
So I was already not impressed with the CBC website or the Chicago Tribune, and then someone sent me a link to an online newspaper in which the reviewer's first paragraph explained Tim Burton's career and then went on to explain, in an extremely dim sort of way, why Coraline was a Tim Burton film, and I twittered about it. And then watched the delighted twitterverse pile onto the poor gentleman in the comments page with surprise, realising that this power must only be used for good.
(There are a lot more people reading this blog than are following me on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/neilhimself. But still, deploying 22,000 people at once is an amazing thing.) (Not as good as Stephen Fry, of course. For he is the awesome god-emperor of Twitter. Also he sent me a direct message to say how much he liked Coraline.)
Some people thought I was grumpy about me not getting credit for Coraline. I'm not grumpy -- and believe me, I am getting more credit than authors of original books ever usually get. I was grumpy on Henry's behalf.
Which is mostly a preamble to give context to Randy Milholland's lovely cartoon at
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02092009.shtml
Word-of-mouth must be very good for the film's financial take to be virtually unchanged a week later. 
I'd posted this back in 2016, over ten years ago!
