Adopting Coraline

Years back, before Coraline was even written as a Novel, Neil Gaiman met Henry Selick. In this encounter Gaiman mentioned that he had Selick in mind as a potential director for the animating of one of his novels some day in the future. Then along came Coraline.

Selick is a stop-motion animation director from New Jersey, he's best known for his works in James and the Giant Peach and the even better known Nightmare Before Christmas. It is said that Selick has also taken an interest to Gaiman's book, The Graveyard Book as well. (Hopefully!)


INTERESTING SIDE NOTE:
The dollar bill given to the movers as a tip at the beginning of the movie presents Selick's face on the bill.

The Book vs The Movie

There are quite a few minor details in the book that they had changed for the film. The main one would be that there is no Wybie in the book. Selick added this character so that Coraline wouldn't been wondering around talk to herself, and frankly, Gaiman liked the idea. Other than that, the book is supposedly set entirely in England, rather than the US, like the movie. There are no dolls (in the book), no fantastic garden, and little facts here and there were altered, like names and order of events, etc.

Visual Inspiration

I found through my numerous viewings of the Special Features of my Coraline Bluray; Henry Selick goes to tell of his inspiration for the colors and styles of the movie and its sets and puppets came from his love of the Japanese illustrator,  Tadahiro Uesugi. He fell in love with the simplicity of his work and the vibrant/strong color combinations that he uses in his work. Selick had his team of concept artists focus their work around a similar style for the movie.

Coraline in Stopmotion

Coraline is a stop motion film, which means that the puppets and movements you see in the movie were actually just the objects being  manipulated by the animators frame by frame. According to these animators there were 24 frames per second of the movie, so considering the film is 100 minutes long, that's 144,000 frames to be shot to create this movie. It was also mentioned that it took an animator a week to complete 7 seconds of the film, so if one animator were to complete the film all on their own it would take approximately 16.5 years (and that's not counting all the time put into creating the sets and puppets!)

SIDE NOTES:

• Coraline is the first stop-motion film shot entirely in 3D
• Coraline is the (at 1:40:00) is the longest stop motion film to date
• the film had the most stages ever deployed for a stop-motion animated feature
• This film marks the first time that a stop-motion animated morphing sequence has ever been accomplished. The sequence runs for 130 frames, or nearly six seconds. 
• On the back of the moving van you'll see graffiti on the bottom right corner that reads "StopMo Rulz." StopMo is short for Stop-Motion.

Building a tiny world

 

In the creation of Coraline the movie, every single tiny detail was hand crafted by someone on the team. From every blade of grass, to every strand of hair on the puppet's heads. Nothing was computer generated, Henry Selick did not want anything computer generated. Even the flame that burns up the doll of her parents in the fire place was created by John Allan Armstrong. It took him about 3-4 weeks and 1,200 drawings to create the illusion of fire in that short scene. The same goes for the fog throughout the movie, Selick hired a team to focus on creating fog with the help of using air guns and cutting and pasting clips of manipulated dry ice.

OTHER FACTS:

• 1,300 square feet of fake fur was used to stand in for live and/or fake grass
• The snow was made of superglue and baking soda
• Over 130 sets were built across 52 different stages at the studios; spanning 183,000 square feet, the 52 different stages were the most ever deployed for a stop-motion animated feature. 
•  The leaves in the scene where Coraline is returning to the well were created by spraying popcorn pink and cutting it up into little pieces.

The Setting

Although Coraline's family moves from Michigan and  it is never formally mentioned in the film, the movie is supposedly set in Ashland, Oregon. This is because the Laika Entertainment - the American stop-motion animation studios - is based in Oregon.

One way they portrayed evidence of their location was through the stage performers outside the Mulch shop and the signs over town when they drop off Charlie, Coraline's dad, right before they go school clothes shopping. This refers to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that is held in Ashland.

Pulling Together the Puppets

These puppets had their own little skeletons  made of wire. Layered on top of the skeleton was their body/skin, which is made of silicone. The dolls had to be made flexible so they could be manipulated from shot to shot by the animators. The characters had a top and bottom part of their face that clips on allowing a wide variety of facial combinations and expressions. Coraline alone had 207,336 possible face combinations! There were different people hired for different purposes just in the puppet department. One woman was hired specifically to create the characters hair, which she used different types of hairs and fibers and layered them with glue and wire so they could be manipulated. There was also a team who focused strictly on the creation of the hands, and another woman who was hired to knit tiny sweaters - using knitting needles as thin as human hair!

• "To construct 1 puppet of Coraline, 10 individuals had to work 3-4 months."
• "For the character of Coraline, there were 28 different puppets of varying sizes; the main Coraline puppet stands 9.5 inches high."
• An outfit was never completely finished until the end of the movie (because of the rips and mud added as the story progresses) 
• Coraline is the first stop-motion character with her own wardrobe - consisting of 9 outfits. 
• "At one point in the movie, Coraline shows 16 different expressions in a span of 35 seconds."