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Dark Fantasy Horror

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Completing the film involved more than 500 people over four years. Principal photography alone took 18 months.

The Coraline puppet had 42 different wigs. Her hair was a special blend of three colors and was made of everyday hair products that included Got2Be Glued Hair Cement and Garnier Fructis Texture Paste.

The film required more than 70 character fabricators, puppet wranglers, armaturists , mold makers, character painters, costume designers and fabricators, and hair and wig fabricators.

Acclaimed stop-motion studio LAIKA has compiled a helpful guide on where to find their five artistically bold and highly enjoyable Oscar-nominated features - available across a range of physical, streaming and digital platforms in the U.S., Canada and U.K.

I freaking love LAIKA studios. Their work is amazing and I think stop-motion animation is highly underrated.

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Completing the film involved more than 500 people over four years. Principal photography alone took 18 months. The Coraline puppet had 42 different wigs. Her hair was a special blend of three colors and was made of everyday hair products that included Got2Be Glued Hair Cement and Garnier Fructis Texture Paste.

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Movie Review | 'Coraline'

A scene from "Coraline." Credit... Focus Features

Coraline

NYT Critic's Pick

Directed by Henry Selick

Animation, Drama, Fantasy, Thriller

PG

1h 40m

There are many scenes and images in "Coraline" that are likely to scare children. This is not a warning but rather a recommendation, since the cultivation of fright can be one of the great pleasures of youthful moviegoing. As long as it doesn't go too far toward violence or mortal dread, a film that elicits a tingle of unease or a tremor of spookiness can be a tonic to sensibilities dulled by wholesome, anodyne, school-approved entertainments.

Books, these days, often do a better job than movies of parceling out juvenile terror. There is plenty of grisly screen horror out there for teenagers, of course, but younger children are more amply served by fiction from the likes of R. L. Stine, Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman, on whose fast-moving, suspenseful novel "Coraline" is based. The film, an exquisitely realized 3-D stop-motion animated feature directed and written by Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "James and the Giant Peach") has a slower pace and a more contemplative tone than the novel. It is certainly exciting, but rather than race through ever noisier set pieces toward a hectic climax in the manner of so much animation aimed at kids, "Coraline" lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

Its look and mood may remind adult viewers at various times of the dreamscapes of Tim Burton (with whom Mr. Selick worked on "Nightmare"), Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch. Like those filmmakers Mr. Selick is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama.

The governing emotion, at the beginning, is loneliness. A smart, brave girl named Coraline Jones, voiced by Dakota Fanning, has recently moved from Michigan to an apartment in a big pink Victorian house somewhere in Oregon. She is at an age when the inadequacy of her parents starts to become apparent, and Coraline's stressed-out, self-absorbed mom and dad (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), who write about gardening, barely look up from their computer screens when she's in the room. And so, like many a children's book heroine before her, Coraline sets out to explore her curious surroundings, interweaving the odd details of everyday reality with the bright threads of imagination. She is accompanied from time to time by a local boy (Robert Bailey Jr.) and a talking cat (Keith David).

Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline's dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment. Her neighbors are a collection of eccentrics whose physical peculiarities match their quirks of character. Upstairs there is a Russian circus artist with the rasping voice of Ian McShane, while below a pair of aging burlesque performers twitter and chirp in the giddy tones of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, queens of British TV comedy.

A secret door in the wall, which opens only at night, leads Coraline to a parallel world that at first seems to fulfill her sad heart's every desire. The versions of her parents who live there — a queen-bee "other mother" and her agreeable mate — are warm and attentive, and the pink house is a wild wonderland where gardens bloom in moonlight and every visit discloses new amusements. The oddball neighbors are there, in altered form, to enthrall Coraline with nightly spectacles — a dream vaudeville that will transfix the movie's audience as well.

The 3-D aspects of "Coraline" are unusually subtle. Now and then stuff is flung off the screen into your face, but the point is not to make you duck or shriek. Instead Mr. Selick uses the technology to make his world deeper and more intriguing. And of course the stop-motion technique he uses, based on sculptured figures rather than drawn images, is already a kind of three-dimensional animation. The glasses you put on are thus not a gimmick but an aid to seeing what's already there.

And what is there, on the screen, is almost too much to absorb in one sitting: costumed mice and Scottish terriers; glowing blossoms and giant insects. The "other" world Coraline explores is fascinating, but also unsettling. Everyone there has buttons for eyes, like homemade dolls, and if she wants to stick around, Coraline will have to become like them.

This simple, horrifying operation — foreshadowed in the haunting opening title sequence — unlocks a cellarful of psychological implications. It would be too simple to say that the door in the wall leads directly to the unconscious. Mr. Selick is hardly a doctrinaire Freudian, but he does grasp the intimate connection between fairy tales and the murky, occult power of longing, existential confusion and misplaced desire. "Coraline" explores the predatory implications of parental love — that other mother is a monster of misplaced maternal instinct — but is grounded in the pluck and common sense of its heroine, who is resilient, ingenious and magically real.

"Coraline" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). There are many scenes and images that are likely to scare young children. CORALINE Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Henry Selick; written by Mr. Selick, based on the book by Neil Gaiman; director of photography, Pete Kozachik; edited by Christopher Murrie and Ronald Sanders; music by Bruno Coulais; production designer, Mr. Selick; produced by Mr. Selick, Bill Mechanic, Claire Jennings and Mary Sandell; released by Focus Features. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Dakota Fanning (Coraline Jones), Teri Hatcher (Mother/Other Mother), Jennifer Saunders (Miss Spink), Dawn French (Miss Forcible), Keith David (Cat), John Hodgman (Father/Other Father), Robert Bailey Jr. (Wybie Lovat) and Ian McShane (Mr. Bobinsky).

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Cornered in a Parallel World (Published 2009)

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Movie Review | 'Coraline' Coraline NYT Critic's Pick Directed by Henry Selick Animation, Drama, Fantasy, Thriller PG 1h 40m There are many scenes and images in "Coraline" that are likely to scare children. This is not a warning but rather a recommendation, since the cultivation of fright can be one of the great pleasures of youthful moviegoing.

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Coraline Movie (2009)

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On what basis did you choose your topic? Did you choose it because of a long-standing interest in films, TV, books, or video games or because of something else?

I chose to do this movie because it has always been a big part of my life when it comes to horror film and allowed for me to establish a platform to come to love horror movies and every aspect that comes with the horror genre. Not only that but Coraline has always held a high standing in popularity, yet I never seen many students around me talking enough about it.

Did your evaluation and thesis seem obvious from the beginning, or did you have to think for a long time before settling on them?

For my evaluation and thesis, for me it came to me from the start. I’ve seen the movie enough times to have memorized the lines in the script and replay it in my head, however my struggle came from having to formulate my thoughts into writing.

What made this topic personally appealing?

The topic was personally appealing when it came to the production based on what I’ve heard and seen before a few years ago and the interest resurfaced again when the film was coming back to theatres where in which I went to go see it.

What was easy about composing your essay? What was hard?

The easy part about composing my essay was jotting down a lot of ideas with what I was going to write about and having a lot of previous background knowledge of my primary source. The hard part came when I had to organize my thoughts properly to formulate the body of my essay.

What would you do differently if you could start over again?

If I could restart, I would try to focus on wording my ideas better and include more of my own writing style.

In what ways did you revise your essay between the first and final drafts?

I ended up writing over the limit a lot more than I originally planned to when it came to the body paragraphs and kept needing to reread and remove sentences that didn’t add much to the overall point I was trying to make.

How did you get ideas for revision? Was it from peer feedback, your instructor, or a

tutor?

I got revision ideas from peer feedback and my own critiques when I reread my essay out loud to make sure it sounded grammatically right.

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Ever since my introduction to the horror genre, it has always fascinated me and that fascination only grew as I got older and was able to watch a lot of horror movies but some of my favorites came from the Dark Fantasy Horror genre, such as The Crow (1994), The Craft (1996), Crimson Peak (2015), and more, all of which are great movies if anyone would be interested in recommendations for those types of movies that aren’t inherently scary but have the same level of being disturbing and suspenseful.

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As an example of the dark fantasy horror, Coraline (2009) is exceptional because younger audiences are exposed to horror in the form of colorful yet suspenseful scenes as they follow the young protagonist Coraline on a journey full of bravery and get accustomed to horror easier and quicker as they grow older to gain the capability of enjoying a family friendly piece of film.