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'Each puppet is then cast in a silicone substance to create the skin, then painted and given hair -- which also must be animatable. Selick says Susan Multon, head of the hair department, has created for Coraline the best-looking hair ever seen in a stop-motion movie. "Susan came along with this technique of actually animating hair and has perfected it with each character," Hayns adds. "She's designed all the armatures that go inside to make it work, and worked with the armature team." '

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'Each puppet is then cast in a silicone substance to create the skin, then painted and given hair -- which also must be animatable. Selick says Susan Multon, head of the hair department, has created for Coraline the best-looking hair ever seen in a stop-motion movie. "Susan came along with this technique of actually animating hair and has perfected it with each character," Hayns adds. "She's designed all the armatures that go inside to make it work, and worked with the armature team." '

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https://www.awn.com/animationworld/set-coraline-where-motion-doesnt-stop

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combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with modern 3-D. Here lead animator Travis Knight checks the framing on Coraline. Photo credit: Kelvin Jones. All images © Focus Features.

In Neil Gaiman's popular 2002 novella Coraline, a young girl discovers a hidden passageway in an old house to a strange and opposite "other" world -- an experience not unlike visiting the "set" of the animated movie that will bring the book to the big screen.

Produced by Oregon-based Laika Ent., Coraline is an unusual movie in several respects. Bucking the CG toon trend, Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with the newfangled wonders of modern 3-D. All this under the direction of James and the Giant Peach, and filming in a surprisingly nondescript industrial park office complex just outside the lush green environs of Portland.

At the time of the set visit in late May, Selick says the film is two-thirds complete after about a year and a half of production, which followed a year of pre-production. The schedule for finishing the film is tight -- set to wrap in late summer or early autumn, the film is slated for a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, followed by a nationwide release on Feb. 6 from Focus Features.

Selick says the long process of making the film began in 2000, before Gaiman's popular novella had been published. At that time he managed to convince first the author and then producer Bill Mechanic that animation struck the right tone for the creepy kids tale. "This is a scary book for kids. If it's animation, I think that it takes a little of the edge off the worst moments, but it keeps the Grimm's fairy tale quality," he says.

There are changes in Selick's adaptation, although the story remains essentially the same: A girl named Coraline discovers a passageway to a world much like our own that nonetheless seems better in many ways -- until her "Other Mother" kidnaps her real parents and demands that Coraline stay. But it's now set in Oregon as opposed to the Midwest, and Selick has added a local boy named Wylie to the cast, a move he says helps by giving Coraline someone to talk to. Another character, Mr. Bobo, has been made more energetic and given a Russian accent in his transition to Mr. Bobinsky.

Heading up the cast is Dakota Fanning as Coraline, with Teri Hatcher as Mother and Other Mother, Jon Hodgman as Father and Other Father, Keith David as The Cat, Ian McShane as Bobinsky, and the English comedy duo of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as the theatrically minded neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.

Production is in full swing at this point, and there are more than 28 animators working at any one time on rehearsing or shooting scenes for the film and producing 90-100 seconds of finished animation each week. Work proceeds at a steady pace throughout the massive Laika facility as craftsmen prepare from scratch all the puppets, costumes, sets and props needed to make the film one frame at a time.

Creating the necessary elements takes unusual talent and lots of time. The costume department, headed up by Deborah Cook, is chock full of tiny clothes all made by hand to exacting standards. Because of wear and tear, each costume is made in multiples. Cook shows a pair of tiny pajamas worn by Coraline in the film, of which 30 identical pairs were made. Each copy had to be identical down to the way the pattern broke at the seams.

Georgina Hayns, who has the unique title of puppet fabrication supervisor, says making such clothes in quantity requires highly specialized talent. "We've actually got a miniature knitter, who is actually part of the guild of craftspeople in the United States, and we found her on the Internet," she says. Even with such talent, clothing these puppets is also a game of patience -- it takes about three weeks to make a simple sweater.

Next to costume design is a larger room devoted to puppet fabrication. As with costumes, multiple puppets are made for the main characters and there are 28 Coraline puppets. Each puppet also has multiple pairs of backup hands, which are especially prone to wear and tear and often need to be replaced, Hayns says.

Puppets begin with an armature designed to give them a full range of motion. They are made mostly of ball-and-socket joints manufactured by a company in San Francisco. Each puppet also has two heads, each with a different base expression to give animators a greater potential range of facial expressions.

"We try to get as much into these mechanical heads as we possibly can, but without distorting the face so much," says Hayns. "Because if you're not careful, you can over-animate these. We try to get the subtlety of movement in there as much as possible."

Hayns says the biggest challenge in making the puppets is that every part that the animator may want to control has to be made "animatable." "So you have to take into account that even if there's a tiny piece of fabric blowing behind [a puppet], you have to wire it or you have to put lead in it so it's animatable," she says.

Each puppet is then cast in a silicone substance to create the skin, then painted and given hair -- which also must be animatable. Selick says Susan Multon, head of the hair department, has created for Coraline the best-looking hair ever seen in a stop-motion movie. "Susan came along with this technique of actually animating hair and has perfected it with each character," Hayns adds. "She's designed all the armatures that go inside to make it work, and worked with the armature team."

Puppets also go through a painting stage, giving detail and definition to faces and even clothing. Applying paint to a puppet can be a very high-pressure task because the painter doesn't want to make a mistake after all the work that has gone in.

Up next is the construction department, managed by Lee "Bo" Henry, who shows off a highly detailed moving van and dolly constructed completely from scratch. Henry says it's incredibly rare that he or his crew use anything bought off the shelf, simply because the odds are against any commercial product having both the right look and scale. "We seldom find something that's of the right scale and appropriate in any kind of a buy-out situation," he says.

Henry's department has several sub-departments: models and props, construction and carpentry, and painting. There also is a sculpting department that creates landscapes for the film. The largest set on this film is the orchard set, which is 60 feet long. And, as with the puppets, everything must be animatable -- including the plants and grass, which needs to be able to look like it's being blown by the wind. On the fantastical garden set, dozens of colorful flowers need to bloom, and also must allow for Coraline and her Other Father to view the scene from above in a large "grasshopper" helicopter.

Selick says Henry's crew builds more live-action sets than any regular movie can afford, and there are considerations other movies don't have to make -- mainly making sets accessible to animators. Large sets such as the fantastical garden are built to break away and have openings underneath for animators to reach through and adjust the puppets. Other sets have such simple devices as trapdoors and swing-away walls. It takes weeks to build sets -- some of which will only be seen for a few seconds in the final film.

The creative needs of the film require the same attention to detail that the puppet fabricators apply to their jobs. For example, the two worlds Coraline travels between are meant to be similar in form but to have completely different tones: The real world is flat and a bit more worn than the slightly glossier look of the Other World. And with 3-D an element in the movie, the Other World sets are constructed with more depth to make them feel more open and inviting than the comparatively cramped real world.

"We are shooting in 3-D and we wanted to take advantage and really show it off," says Selick. "To your eye, all you know is it feels better, but it's two different sets."

Completed sets are turned over to lighting before the animators begin their work. On one set, the film's lead cat animator, Sarah de Gaudemar, is animating a scene in which Coraline and The Cat walk through the Orchard to the edges of the Other World. She has a guide as to which position the characters' mouths need to be in to match the dialog in each frame, as well as a guide to key poses.

Selick says he encourages animators to work together, but most prefer to work solo. A few will shoot reference video, but not all -- and he's fine with that. "If you rely on live action to do the work for you, you're not really getting the essence of animation," he says. "When you go all the way to basing it on humans, like what used to be rotoscoping, where you trace actors, you see that if it's not done well, it's like the worst of both worlds. It's not great animation."

To create the 3-D effect, each shot is photographed using a digital camera that shoots a frame for one eye, then moves a very small, preprogrammed distance and shoots the other. The animator can check what's been shot on a computer monitor.

"The 3-D effect is kind of based on what's the distance between your eyes," says Selick. "Of course, Coraline's eyes are much closer together because she's much smaller, so we shoot a left eye and a right eye with the same camera. It travels very precisely in very small amounts."

Selick says they've tried to incorporate 3-D into the film to make it more than a gimmick, but he's sure that the 2D version that will be seen in most theaters around the world and on DVD will be satisfying too.

"It will work in 2D and work quite well -- that's actually how I deal with the film most of the time," he says. "But I think 3-D is just a more memorable experience."

Other animators working on shots include Travis Knight, who works on a scene set in the Orchard -- where cherry blossoms are made form painted popcorn. Animation supervisor Anthony Scott shoots a scene in the Other Mother's living room, and lead animator Eric Leighton works on the large and complicated set of the theater where Forcible and Spink put on shows for hundreds of little Scottie dogs. Leighton says the scenes are very challenging to animate, as each has so many elements to control and the set is so big that he has to move all around it and onto scaffolding behind it to reach every puppet, prop and set piece that needs to be set up for a single frame.

With the film's completion deadline looming, Selick says he spends most of his time going back and forth between two editing bays. The film will feature songs by alt rock band They Might Be Giants, and a score from French composer Bruno Coulais.

CG will be used on the film, mostly to erase in the puppets' faces the removable parts needed to make them appear to speak, as well as rig removal. Selick says there will be some additional visual effects done in-house by Laika, but he says they are shooting for a handmade look that matches the rest of the film and that they're "based on practical stuff that we then combine."

CG technology also can be used to occasionally alter or re-time scenes that would otherwise be too expensive or time-consuming to re-shoot, Selick says. "Once in a while, there's a disaster and we do have a great guy, the head of our visual effects, Brian Van't Hul. If there's a disaster and we really can't afford to re-shoot it, he can kind of make a fake in-between or smooth something out."

Selick says the experience of making the film has been rewarding. Gaiman has seen most of it and the author seems very happy with the results.

"The biggest challenge was always going to be bringing Coraline to life. That was the thing I was always most interested in doing. She's not an outlandish, cartoon character -- she's the straight man of the show," he says.

He's also pleased with the look of the film and thinks it will stand out with audiences for all the right reasons. "It's the imperfections (in stop-motion animation) that I think make it attractive, that bring the audience in," Selick says. "So we keep trying for perfection, but we'll never get it -- and it would be a mistake if we did, because then there would be no point. We would be doing CG."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comic book blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.

Tom McLean has been writing for years about animation from a secret base in Los Angeles.

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On the Set with 'Coraline': Where the Motion Doesn't Stop

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combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with modern 3-D. Here lead animator Travis Knight checks the framing on Coraline. Photo credit: Kelvin Jones. All images © Focus Features. In Neil Gaiman's popular 2002 novella Coraline, a young girl discovers a hidden passageway in an old house to a strange and opposite "other" world -- an experience not unlike visiting the "set" of the animated movie that will bring the book to the big screen.

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The characters are especially "important to analyze here "because there are two of almost every character except Coraline. In the “real world” that Coraline actually lives in, all of the characters are static and don’t have much of a personality." 

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The characters are especially "important to analyze here "because there are two of almost every character except Coraline. In the “real world” that Coraline actually lives in, all of the characters are static and don’t have much of a personality." 

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https://blogs.longwood.edu/engl301rhetoricalcriticism17/2020/02/03/post-3-narrative-analysis-of-coraline-2009/

"Some key characters in the film are:
Mel and Charlie Jones (Coraline’s parents)    Mr. Bobinsky, Miss Forcible and Miss Spink (Her neighbors)
Wybie Lovat and his grandmother (The apartment owners who allow the Jones family to stay there)
These characters in the other world are the exact kind of people that Coraline wants them to be – they interact with her, they keep her entertained, and they give her love. None of these things are happening for her in her reality."

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Coraline (2009) is a film that might be more intelligent than it is supposed to be for its intended audience. It's rated PG, but still has scenes that could be considered "unsuitable" for children under 8 years old. It explores many thrilling topics such as kidnap, evil magic, and even murder.

Rhetorical Situation
Coraline and her family move from Michigan to Oregon. As her parents struggle to complete their gardening catalog, Coraline is often left alone because they put their work above her. Their new home, Pink Palace Apartments, has a dark history - the kids who lived there before them all mysteriously disappeared. Because of this, Coraline's family is the first one with a kid in 50 years to live there. Coraline's neighbor and only friend, Wybie, gives her a doll that eerily looks exactly like her. Little do they both know, the doll is a tool from another dimension used to lure Coraline to it.

The other dimension is the same as the one she lives in, with a twist - she is paid attention to, fed, and loved. However, Coraline learns to discover that love comes with a cost. Her "other mother" is actually a Beldam that is trying to keep her soul in order to live.

This movie's advertised audience is children, but it's been argued since its release 11 years ago that it should be intended for more mature audiences due to the visuals and the concepts.

Narrative Analysis
The narrative perspective is a method for examining ideological arguments conveyed through storytelling (Sellnow 53). Essentially, it is used to find the moral of a story. I believe this analysis fits this movie the best because there are many underlying themes and ideas to this story. The main one being, always be grateful for what you have, as you never know when it can be taken from you. This is important for the storyline because the whole reason Coraline gets herself in the mess with the Beldam is because she isn't grateful for the life she has - while it isn't entirely her fault, she's young and naive, and her "Other Mother" takes advantage of that.

Coraline is a story that ties many concepts together in a short amount of time - however, the storyline is still very coherent as it all comes together in different pieces throughout the movie. Each time you watch it, you notice more and more references to something else in the movie that you didn't notice the first time. Given that this is a fantasy/thriller movie, looking at the structural coherence of the film is the most sensible. The story obviously doesn't seem plausible since it's a work of fiction, but it definitely makes sense within the realm of which it is written. The movie wouldn't be what it is without the characters, who continually grow in the film to be more independent and willing to fight. The movie starts with Coraline's family moving in. Then, as she goes to bed that day, she discovers the "Other world" that's been waiting for her. She sees that her neighbors are also in this world, but they are more dynamic characters in the "other world" than they are in hers. She then starts to realize that the world she prefers is not all its cracked up to be, and needs to escape. By then, it's too late, so she has to find a way to get out of the Beldam's grasp and back into her world where she can live with her family peacefully.

The characters are especially important to analyze here because there are two of almost every character except Coraline. In the "real world" that Coraline actually lives in, all of the characters are static and don't have much of a personality. Some key characters in the film are:

Mel and Charlie Jones (Coraline's parents)

Mr. Bobinsky, Miss Forcible and Miss Spink (Her neighbors)

Wybie Lovat and his grandmother (The apartment owners who allow the Jones family to stay there)

These characters in the other world are the exact kind of people that Coraline wants them to be - they interact with her, they keep her entertained, and they give her love. None of these things are happening for her in her reality.

Implications of the text
I think it's really interesting to look at the possible implications of Coraline considering it's a kids movie that isn't really categorized as such. I do think that for its time, it's a really important film about independence and creativity. Even though I believe the true moral of the story is "be grateful for what you have", I think it also highlights the importance of safety, and relatively touches on the topic of "stranger danger". While Coraline thought she knew her Other Mother and Other Father, she didn't; and the Beldam used that to her advantage. This movie is a good lesson for children on gratefulness as well as safety, while also showing that fear can be one's highest motivator.

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Post #3: Narrative Analysis of Coraline (2009)

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Coraline (2009) is a film that might be more intelligent than it is supposed to be for its intended audience. It's rated PG, but still has scenes that could be considered "unsuitable" for children under 8 years old. It explores many thrilling topics such as kidnap, evil magic, and even murder.

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2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions - Pete Kozachik, ASC details his strategies for the 3-D stop-motion movie Coraline

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2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions - Pete Kozachik, ASC details his strategies for the 3-D stop-motion movie Coraline

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https://www.proquest.com/docview/196341208/fulltextPDF/350E2E1FFD7F4239PQ/1?accountid=145504

Exciting events tend to happen as soon as conditions are right, and Henry Selick's stop-motion feature Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman's supernatural novella, rides in on a host of new innovations, including advanced machinevision cameras and the emergence of practical 3-D. Most instrumental was the birth of Laika Entertainment, Phil Knight's startup animation company in Oregon, fresh and eager to try something new.

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Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

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https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=coraline+movie&btnG=

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D Torre - ANIMATION: KEY FILMS/FILMMAKERS, 2021 - library.oapen.org

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"it was also the fact that Coraline told a scary story about a smart tween named Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who's unhappy about the new town where she and her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have just moved, discovering a surreal universe through a doorway in the spooky house they now call home."

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"it was also the fact that Coraline told a scary story about a smart tween named Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who's unhappy about the new town where she and her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have just moved, discovering a surreal universe through a doorway in the spooky house they now call home."

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https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/this-week-in-genre-history-coraline-animation

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Welcome to "This Week in Genre History," where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world's greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
In the past 25 years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, making computers the principal tool for the artform. DreamWorks and others have followed in the Disney company's footsteps, creating visual wonders through this incredible technology. But those often indelible films don't represent all that animation can do. Sometimes, the old-fashioned techniques can be just as powerful.

On Feb. 6, 2009, a company called Laika revealed its first full-length stop-motion animated film, a dark children's adventure based on a Neil Gaiman book. didn't exactly come out of nowhere - in fact, it wasn't even that year's only major stop-motion offering - but it established Laika as a player in the animation world, proving that its filmmakers' lovingly handmade aesthetic could flourish in a world dominated by Woody, Buzz, and Shrek.

Not that it was easy to convince Hollywood at the time that this would work. Never mind the decision to use stop-motion - it was also the fact that Coraline told a scary story about a smart tween named Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who's unhappy about the new town where she and her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have just moved, discovering a surreal universe through a doorway in the spooky house they now call home. In a 2013 interview, Gaiman recounted the notes they got back from studios about why they wanted no part of Coraline: "It's got a female protagonist, so clearly boys will not go see a movie like this. But it's really scary, so girls are not gonna be into that. And it's in stop-motion - nobody wants to see stop-motion!"

Luckily, Focus Features disagreed, and Coraline rewarded the company's faith by becoming a modest hit and an Oscar nominee. The film didn't change the way Hollywood thought of animation, but it proved once more that stop-motion deserved a place at the animation table. Better yet, the film provided a valuable reminder: So-called kids' movies didn't have to treat their audience like toddlers. Young people like a good scare, too, if it's done well.

Why was it a big deal at the time? Laika was born in the early 21st century when Phil Knight, the mastermind behind Nike, purchased Will Vinton Studios, a struggling stop-motion company that had been pioneers in claymation. (They were responsible for the California Raisins and the Domino's Pizza mascot the Noid.) Renamed Laika, the company was handed over to one of its animators, Knight's son Travis, who had been geeking over stop-motion ever since he was a kid. "I loved the Rankin Bass holiday specials, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," Travis Knight once recalled, "but above all, I loved the Ray Harryhausen creature features. I think the thing that made me a little bit unusual is that I wanted to learn how to do it."

One of the other artists involved early on with Laika was Henry Selick, a filmmaker who'd always championed stop-motion. After all, he was the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas - Tim Burton came up with the story, but it was Selick who brought it to life - and James and the Giant Peach. (He'd also assisted Wes Anderson on 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, handling the animation of that comedy's quirky underwater creatures.) When Selick was going to adapt Gaiman's 2002 novella, he knew what the industry obstacles were going to be - and why that wouldn't stop him.

"[ Nightmare and Giant Peach were] the same time that Pixar was coming up," Selick said at the time of Coraline's release. "They were hugely successful. They were great stories, great designs, but clearly, it was like 'CG's the modern way to go.' Stop-motion had a very hard time getting funded for quite a while. But now, after this much time, the CG element is not new anymore. People are interested again in stop-motion. They're less expensive to make. They don't have to make as much money."

There had been stop-motion hits at the time - notably, 2000's Chicken Run from Aardman, the folks behind Wallace and Gromit. But as unique and charming as the look of stop-motion can be, it has one huge disadvantage: It takes forever to animate. For one thing, each puppet in Coraline required multiple iterations to convey the full range of emotions. "On Coraline, she had about 600 mouths, about 300 brows, combine all of those and you had about 200,000 different facial expressions she could make," Knight once said. Plus, because you have to shoot each incremental movement, it's a painstaking process. In fact, Coraline took about 30 months to film. "It kind of hurts my stomach when I think about it but, on a good day, you'll maybe get two or three seconds of finished animation," Selick told the Los Angeles Times. "Every little bit of life that you see on screen is life that's been sucked out of an animator. And you can guarantee that if a shot is really great, if it really sings, that underneath a desk somewhere is an animator huddled in a fetal position, weeping."

Because of that time-intensive process, Laika might have been tempted to temper the more horrifying elements of Gaiman's story. (At first, Coraline thinks this parallel universe she's unearthed, known as the Other World, is wonderful - her parents are a lot cooler in that world, despite having buttons for eyes - but soon, she'll realize it's home to an unsettling secret.) But Selick stuck to his guns, making Coraline sufficiently creepy, complete with ghost children and mirror-image parents who grow increasingly more terrifying. "I say it's for brave children of all ages," Selick said back then, and indeed the movie's macabre tone was markedly different from other animated fare at the multiplex.

But maybe Coraline could find its niche anyway? The previous year had seen four animated movies end up in the Top 10 highest-grossing films of 2008: Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and Horton Hears a Who! Sure, most of those were geared primarily to tots, but that Pixar sci-fi adventure Wall-E had an ambition and seriousness of purpose that challenged its audience. Boosted by strong reviews, which focused on the film's expressive stop-motion and grownup themes, Coraline hoped to be a different kind of animated hit, too.

What was the impact? When Coraline opened in early February 2009, it was bested at the box office by the frothy rom-com He's Just Not That Into You, although it did outperform another kids' film that was also debuting, The Pink Panther 2. It hung in the Top 10 through late March, going on to earn about $75 million domestically and grossing an additional $49 million abroad. The following year, it was nominated for Best Animated Feature - alongside another stop-motion film, Fantastic Mr. Fox (which, by the way, didn't do as well as Coraline, only bringing in about $47 million worldwide) - but eventually lost to Up.

So, Coraline was a success, but not at the level of a Pixar or DreamWorks' offerings. Still, the film helped demonstrate that Laika was a viable animation house. "It was certainly good that the film did as well as it did - it was well-received critically - and that it did as well financially as it did, because that [helped] to announce to the world that Laika is here, that we're around," Knight recalled in 2016. "When we started working in the film business, obviously nobody knew who we were, because we didn't have a track record. So trying to find partners for distribution and everything else was a big challenge."

In the same interview, he reiterated what Gaiman had also mentioned, which is that Coraline had faced resistance because it had a female main character. "The reasons for why people weren't interested [in teaming up with us]... was 'You can't have a female protagonist in an animated film,'" Knight said. "But there's a corollary: 'Unless she's a princess. Maybe a fairy. Otherwise, no.' And so that's the conventional wisdom. These are the rules in the business that we're playing in, and it was shocking to me to hear that feedback."

What's shocking is that this gender imbalance is still pretty rampant in animated movies. Pixar didn't release its first female-driven film until 2012's Brave. When Disney put out Tangled two years earlier, it was only after trying to retool the movie to appeal more to boys. Obviously, 2013's Frozen was a phenomenon, but it, too, was about princesses. That "conventional wisdom" has remained, at least among the big animation houses.

As for Laika, the company has continued to do stop-motion films and continued to make gorgeous, heartfelt stories. ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Missing Link have all been critically acclaimed, but none of them have been able to match Coraline's $125 million worldwide gross. ( Missing Link brought in a disastrous $27 million, and that was a film with a voice cast that included Zach Galifianakis, Hugh Jackman, and Zoe Saldana.) It's, frankly, disheartening that Laika still struggles to be heard amid the din of bigger, flashier animated offerings. In a 2019 interview, Laika producer Arianne Sutner put it succinctly: "There are incredible [animation companies] out there, as you know - you're seeing these movies. And they do what they do so well. But I think nobody else is doing exactly what we're doing so well."

Has it held up? Coraline's championing of an intelligent, sensitive young woman remains moving, as is its portrait of adolescent angst - that feeling that you don't quite fit in and haven't yet found your tribe. Watching it at home now, it's impossible to recapture the feeling of seeing the movie in the theater in 3D. (That trend was mostly hype, but the tactile quality of stop-motion made stereoscopic films really pop.) But in terms of making a legitimately creepy - even sinister - family film with a message about appreciating what you have, Coraline remains a standout.

Last week, Laika announced on Twitter that it had put together a whole set of Coraline GIFs, and it was fun to see those carefully crafted images pop back up on the timeline.

Plus, it was just a nice reminder that, although the world of animated movies is vast - including great work being done in Ireland (Wolfwalkers, The Breadwinner), Japan (Studio Ghibli, home of Spirited Away auteur Hayao Miyazaki), and Austin, Texas (Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow series) - there really isn't anything like a Laika picture. The company has endured some executive shake-ups in the wake of Missing Link's financial failure, and one worries what its future holds. A cinematic landscape without Laika is almost as scary as anything that happens in Coraline.
Tim Grierson is the co-host of The Grierson & Leitch Podcast, where he and Will Leitch review films old and new. Follow them on Twitter or visit their site.

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This Week in Genre History: Coraline ventured into the 'Other World' of animation & reduced creators to tears

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On Feb. 6, 2009, a company called Laika revealed its first full-length stop-motion animated film, a dark children's adventure based on a Neil Gaiman book.

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"Produced by Oregon-based Laika Ent., Coraline is an unusual movie in several respects. Bucking the CG toon trend, Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with the newfangled wonders of modern 3-D. All this under the direction of James and the Giant Peach, and filming in a surprisingly nondescript industrial park office complex just outside the lush green environs of Portland."

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"Produced by Oregon-based Laika Ent., Coraline is an unusual movie in several respects. Bucking the CG toon trend, Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with the newfangled wonders of modern 3-D. All this under the direction of James and the Giant Peach, and filming in a surprisingly nondescript industrial park office complex just outside the lush green environs of Portland."

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https://www.awn.com/animationworld/set-coraline-where-motion-doesnt-stop

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combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with modern 3-D. Here lead animator Travis Knight checks the framing on Coraline. Photo credit: Kelvin Jones. All images © Focus Features.

In Neil Gaiman's popular 2002 novella Coraline, a young girl discovers a hidden passageway in an old house to a strange and opposite "other" world -- an experience not unlike visiting the "set" of the animated movie that will bring the book to the big screen.

Produced by Oregon-based Laika Ent., Coraline is an unusual movie in several respects. Bucking the CG toon trend, Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with the newfangled wonders of modern 3-D. All this under the direction of James and the Giant Peach, and filming in a surprisingly nondescript industrial park office complex just outside the lush green environs of Portland.

At the time of the set visit in late May, Selick says the film is two-thirds complete after about a year and a half of production, which followed a year of pre-production. The schedule for finishing the film is tight -- set to wrap in late summer or early autumn, the film is slated for a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, followed by a nationwide release on Feb. 6 from Focus Features.

Selick says the long process of making the film began in 2000, before Gaiman's popular novella had been published. At that time he managed to convince first the author and then producer Bill Mechanic that animation struck the right tone for the creepy kids tale. "This is a scary book for kids. If it's animation, I think that it takes a little of the edge off the worst moments, but it keeps the Grimm's fairy tale quality," he says.

There are changes in Selick's adaptation, although the story remains essentially the same: A girl named Coraline discovers a passageway to a world much like our own that nonetheless seems better in many ways -- until her "Other Mother" kidnaps her real parents and demands that Coraline stay. But it's now set in Oregon as opposed to the Midwest, and Selick has added a local boy named Wylie to the cast, a move he says helps by giving Coraline someone to talk to. Another character, Mr. Bobo, has been made more energetic and given a Russian accent in his transition to Mr. Bobinsky.

Heading up the cast is Dakota Fanning as Coraline, with Teri Hatcher as Mother and Other Mother, Jon Hodgman as Father and Other Father, Keith David as The Cat, Ian McShane as Bobinsky, and the English comedy duo of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as the theatrically minded neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.

Production is in full swing at this point, and there are more than 28 animators working at any one time on rehearsing or shooting scenes for the film and producing 90-100 seconds of finished animation each week. Work proceeds at a steady pace throughout the massive Laika facility as craftsmen prepare from scratch all the puppets, costumes, sets and props needed to make the film one frame at a time.

Creating the necessary elements takes unusual talent and lots of time. The costume department, headed up by Deborah Cook, is chock full of tiny clothes all made by hand to exacting standards. Because of wear and tear, each costume is made in multiples. Cook shows a pair of tiny pajamas worn by Coraline in the film, of which 30 identical pairs were made. Each copy had to be identical down to the way the pattern broke at the seams.

Georgina Hayns, who has the unique title of puppet fabrication supervisor, says making such clothes in quantity requires highly specialized talent. "We've actually got a miniature knitter, who is actually part of the guild of craftspeople in the United States, and we found her on the Internet," she says. Even with such talent, clothing these puppets is also a game of patience -- it takes about three weeks to make a simple sweater.

Next to costume design is a larger room devoted to puppet fabrication. As with costumes, multiple puppets are made for the main characters and there are 28 Coraline puppets. Each puppet also has multiple pairs of backup hands, which are especially prone to wear and tear and often need to be replaced, Hayns says.

Puppets begin with an armature designed to give them a full range of motion. They are made mostly of ball-and-socket joints manufactured by a company in San Francisco. Each puppet also has two heads, each with a different base expression to give animators a greater potential range of facial expressions.

"We try to get as much into these mechanical heads as we possibly can, but without distorting the face so much," says Hayns. "Because if you're not careful, you can over-animate these. We try to get the subtlety of movement in there as much as possible."

Hayns says the biggest challenge in making the puppets is that every part that the animator may want to control has to be made "animatable." "So you have to take into account that even if there's a tiny piece of fabric blowing behind [a puppet], you have to wire it or you have to put lead in it so it's animatable," she says.

Each puppet is then cast in a silicone substance to create the skin, then painted and given hair -- which also must be animatable. Selick says Susan Multon, head of the hair department, has created for Coraline the best-looking hair ever seen in a stop-motion movie. "Susan came along with this technique of actually animating hair and has perfected it with each character," Hayns adds. "She's designed all the armatures that go inside to make it work, and worked with the armature team."

Puppets also go through a painting stage, giving detail and definition to faces and even clothing. Applying paint to a puppet can be a very high-pressure task because the painter doesn't want to make a mistake after all the work that has gone in.

Up next is the construction department, managed by Lee "Bo" Henry, who shows off a highly detailed moving van and dolly constructed completely from scratch. Henry says it's incredibly rare that he or his crew use anything bought off the shelf, simply because the odds are against any commercial product having both the right look and scale. "We seldom find something that's of the right scale and appropriate in any kind of a buy-out situation," he says.

Henry's department has several sub-departments: models and props, construction and carpentry, and painting. There also is a sculpting department that creates landscapes for the film. The largest set on this film is the orchard set, which is 60 feet long. And, as with the puppets, everything must be animatable -- including the plants and grass, which needs to be able to look like it's being blown by the wind. On the fantastical garden set, dozens of colorful flowers need to bloom, and also must allow for Coraline and her Other Father to view the scene from above in a large "grasshopper" helicopter.

Selick says Henry's crew builds more live-action sets than any regular movie can afford, and there are considerations other movies don't have to make -- mainly making sets accessible to animators. Large sets such as the fantastical garden are built to break away and have openings underneath for animators to reach through and adjust the puppets. Other sets have such simple devices as trapdoors and swing-away walls. It takes weeks to build sets -- some of which will only be seen for a few seconds in the final film.

The creative needs of the film require the same attention to detail that the puppet fabricators apply to their jobs. For example, the two worlds Coraline travels between are meant to be similar in form but to have completely different tones: The real world is flat and a bit more worn than the slightly glossier look of the Other World. And with 3-D an element in the movie, the Other World sets are constructed with more depth to make them feel more open and inviting than the comparatively cramped real world.

"We are shooting in 3-D and we wanted to take advantage and really show it off," says Selick. "To your eye, all you know is it feels better, but it's two different sets."

Completed sets are turned over to lighting before the animators begin their work. On one set, the film's lead cat animator, Sarah de Gaudemar, is animating a scene in which Coraline and The Cat walk through the Orchard to the edges of the Other World. She has a guide as to which position the characters' mouths need to be in to match the dialog in each frame, as well as a guide to key poses.

Selick says he encourages animators to work together, but most prefer to work solo. A few will shoot reference video, but not all -- and he's fine with that. "If you rely on live action to do the work for you, you're not really getting the essence of animation," he says. "When you go all the way to basing it on humans, like what used to be rotoscoping, where you trace actors, you see that if it's not done well, it's like the worst of both worlds. It's not great animation."

To create the 3-D effect, each shot is photographed using a digital camera that shoots a frame for one eye, then moves a very small, preprogrammed distance and shoots the other. The animator can check what's been shot on a computer monitor.

"The 3-D effect is kind of based on what's the distance between your eyes," says Selick. "Of course, Coraline's eyes are much closer together because she's much smaller, so we shoot a left eye and a right eye with the same camera. It travels very precisely in very small amounts."

Selick says they've tried to incorporate 3-D into the film to make it more than a gimmick, but he's sure that the 2D version that will be seen in most theaters around the world and on DVD will be satisfying too.

"It will work in 2D and work quite well -- that's actually how I deal with the film most of the time," he says. "But I think 3-D is just a more memorable experience."

Other animators working on shots include Travis Knight, who works on a scene set in the Orchard -- where cherry blossoms are made form painted popcorn. Animation supervisor Anthony Scott shoots a scene in the Other Mother's living room, and lead animator Eric Leighton works on the large and complicated set of the theater where Forcible and Spink put on shows for hundreds of little Scottie dogs. Leighton says the scenes are very challenging to animate, as each has so many elements to control and the set is so big that he has to move all around it and onto scaffolding behind it to reach every puppet, prop and set piece that needs to be set up for a single frame.

With the film's completion deadline looming, Selick says he spends most of his time going back and forth between two editing bays. The film will feature songs by alt rock band They Might Be Giants, and a score from French composer Bruno Coulais.

CG will be used on the film, mostly to erase in the puppets' faces the removable parts needed to make them appear to speak, as well as rig removal. Selick says there will be some additional visual effects done in-house by Laika, but he says they are shooting for a handmade look that matches the rest of the film and that they're "based on practical stuff that we then combine."

CG technology also can be used to occasionally alter or re-time scenes that would otherwise be too expensive or time-consuming to re-shoot, Selick says. "Once in a while, there's a disaster and we do have a great guy, the head of our visual effects, Brian Van't Hul. If there's a disaster and we really can't afford to re-shoot it, he can kind of make a fake in-between or smooth something out."

Selick says the experience of making the film has been rewarding. Gaiman has seen most of it and the author seems very happy with the results.

"The biggest challenge was always going to be bringing Coraline to life. That was the thing I was always most interested in doing. She's not an outlandish, cartoon character -- she's the straight man of the show," he says.

He's also pleased with the look of the film and thinks it will stand out with audiences for all the right reasons. "It's the imperfections (in stop-motion animation) that I think make it attractive, that bring the audience in," Selick says. "So we keep trying for perfection, but we'll never get it -- and it would be a mistake if we did, because then there would be no point. We would be doing CG."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comic book blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.

Tom McLean has been writing for years about animation from a secret base in Los Angeles.

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On the Set with 'Coraline': Where the Motion Doesn't Stop

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combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with modern 3-D. Here lead animator Travis Knight checks the framing on Coraline. Photo credit: Kelvin Jones. All images © Focus Features. In Neil Gaiman's popular 2002 novella Coraline, a young girl discovers a hidden passageway in an old house to a strange and opposite "other" world -- an experience not unlike visiting the "set" of the animated movie that will bring the book to the big screen.

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"Although the events of Coraline can be interpreted in a number of ways, arguably the most prevalent and justified reading is that the story is about abuse and generational trauma."                                               "The father essentially has no time for his daughter and Coraline is left to turn to her mother, who Ranker notes is cold and dismissive towards her, refusing to give her the time and attention she needs."  

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"Although the events of Coraline can be interpreted in a number of ways, arguably the most prevalent and justified reading is that the story is about abuse and generational trauma."                                               "The father essentially has no time for his daughter and Coraline is left to turn to her mother, who Ranker notes is cold and dismissive towards her, refusing to give her the time and attention she needs."  

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https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/03/30/what-is-the-meaning-behind-coraline/

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We'll never look at buttons the same again.

There are plenty of animated gems beyond the pantheon of Disney classics and over the years many have championed Coraline as a distinct and enduring masterwork.

Directed by Henry Selick, the 2009 American stop-motion animation is a family film that brilliantly blends both horror and fantasy to deliver something palatable for all ages.

Voices from Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, and more help bring Neil Gaiman's 2002 novel of the same name to life on the screen. However, over the years, you may have found yourself tempted to dive deeper, looking between the lines.

With that in mind, what is the meaning behind Coraline?

still from Coraline trailer, LAIKA Studios

What is the meaning behind Coraline?

Although the events of Coraline can be interpreted in a number of ways, arguably the most prevalent and justified reading is that the story is about abuse and generational trauma.

In terms of the first, Coraline's relationship with her mother and the Beldam is turned to.

The father essentially has no time for his daughter and Coraline is left to turn to her mother, who Ranker notes is cold and dismissive towards her, refusing to give her the time and attention she needs.

The world and treatment from the Beldam juxtapose this, with her "mirror" parents of sorts providing Coraline with a way to work through and process the neglect she's fallen victim to.

However, the nice treatment she initially experiences can be interpreted as a calculated method on the Beldam's behalf in order to control Coraline; when she cannot please her wholeheartedly, the Beldam turns.

As the truth begins to reveal, Coraline understands that the kindness she has been shown by the Beldam has been a lie in order to manipulate her.

Both Coraline's mother and the Beldam can be viewed as one of the same. Two sides of the same coin.

Coraline | Official Theatrical Trailer

Another perspective

Furthermore, some may draw upon the potential for the film and novel to be about generational trauma, as Coraline is mistreated and neglected by her parents, suggesting that her parents were raised similarly.

This idea is reinforced upon considering that Coraline begins to inflict similar treatment upon others, adopting her parents' poisonous behaviour.

'I had one huge note on the first draft'

While in conversation with CBR, author Neil Gaiman revealed that he initially found the film's first draft too similar to his own work:

"I had one huge note on the first draft script which was that I thought it was too faithful. [Selick] did a first draft that was very, very faithful but too faithful. A lot of the book occurs in Coraline's head..."

He continued: "you know, she is walking down a corridor and you know what she feels and what she thinks walking down that corridor and suddenly it turned into this thing where you have this girl walking down a lot of corridors."

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What is the deeper meaning behind Coraline?

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What is the meaning behind Coraline? Let's analyse the true nature of both the movie and the Neil Gaiman novel that is is based on.