How the brilliant Henry Selick and his team at LAIKA used 3-D stopmotion to recreate the world of Coraline.
In Neil Gaiman’s popular novella Coraline, a young girl discovers an Other World in which her parents grant her every wish and pay her all the attention she feels is missing in her real life. And director Henry Selick has high hopes that his movie version of Coraline will garner a similar reaction in the real world when Focus Features opens the 3-D, stop-motion animated movie February 6.
Despite the new twist that 3-D brings to the stop-motion process, Selick’ best known as the director of the 1993 Tim Burton-produced holiday classic The Nightmare Before Christmas‘says the story of Coraline is ideally suited to animation in general and stop-motion in particular.
‘I felt in one sense it softened some of the horror elements. It gave the appearance of sweetening things when in fact it’s actually a stronger, bolder way to show the scary stuff,’ says the director, who considered both live action and CG animation for the film. ‘In live action, I think it’d be really difficult to pull this off and get a PG rating, which is what I was set on doing, and it’s what we’ve gotten. It definitely, I think, would have crossed the line.’
Making the film has been a long process for Selick that began when he read an unfinished draft of Gaiman’s novella. ‘It had a strong universal appeal, even if it was strange or creepy or unusual; the appeal being that everyone dreams of getting rid of their parents when you’re a kid,’ he says.
The book was published in 2002, and won a large readership and a slew of honors, including Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards for best novella. Former Disney and Fox executive Bill Mechanic acquired the film rights and put Selick to work on adapting the story’ a journey that had more than its share of road bumps. Selick says it took a while before he was comfortable enough with the story and the characters to change Gaiman’s story into something that worked as a movie.
‘The most effective tool for me was not to use any dialogue and try to figure out, what’s the story? If no one talked, what are the images?’ he says. ‘That was sort of a breakthrough for me. I would do my own sketches, I would write descriptions beyond what Neil might have about the house where they lived ‘ I was able to go deeper in creating the entire world, even if I was only going to use a portion of that, just so I felt that I’d made the characters my own.’
Along the way, Selick made some changes to the story, most notably the addition of a new character, Wybie, a local boy who befriends Coraline, and a stylishly menacing visual transformation for the Other Mother as her conflict with Coraline grows.
Getting the film ready to shoot moved on from the script stage to a two-year pre-production phase in which the movie was fully storyboarded and further refined.
‘In sketching out every shot of the movie, you always find a better way,’he says. That leads to many revisions of the story, with some sequences going through as many as 30 iterations before reaching their final form. ‘Some of the scarier things we’ve done at least 10 versions, 15 versions. There’s nothing in the film that wasn’t redrawn at least eight to 10 times,’ Selick says.
Selick recruited a voice cast of top talent, with Dakota Fanning playing Coraline, Teri Hatcher as Mother and Other Mother, John Hodgman as Father and Other Father, Keith David as The Cat, Ian McShane as upstairs neighbor Bobinsky, Robert Bailey Jr. as Wybie and the English comedy duo of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as the theatrically minded Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.
Production began in early 2007 at LAIKA’s nondescript facility in an industrial park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. With every element of the film needing to be manufactured from scratch, Selick relied on a team of professionals, many of whom have worked with him for more than 20 years. Each main character required multiple puppets’there were 28 versions of Coraline herself’all made with complete articulation by puppet fabrication supervisor Georgina Hayns and her crew. Each puppet had to be built from scratch and took a crew of 10 people between three to four months to complete. Set construction was supervised by Lee ‘Bo’ Henry, while Deborah Cook oversaw costumes and Susan Multon handled hair.
A team of 28 animators worked at any one time, rehearsing or shooting scenes, and producing a total of about 90 to 100 seconds of finished animation per week through 20 months of principal photography.
Despite the intense planning required to make the film, Selick says the process remains open to improvisation. The film was shot generally in chronological order so that the final act in particular can be adjusted. ‘It remains fluid to the very last possible second.’
The most dramatic impact on production was the addition of 3-D. ‘Shooting 3-D was going to be a way to show off the strengths of stop motion, but it also was going to be appropriate for the story in that it’s about discovering a better version of your life,’ says Selick.
To create true stereoscopic 3-D, Coraline was shot with a digital camera that for each exposure would shoot first one eye, then adjust the appropriate distance via a small model mover, and expose the frame again for the second eye.
While the technical elements were mostly worked out prior to shooting, figuring out how far you could go with the 3-D effect was a trial and error process. ‘It took us months to learn that something was going to look awful in 3-D. A lot of our theories proved wrong,’ says Selick.
Now completed, Coraline is carrying the banner for stop-motion features as the studios clamor after the box office and critical success that CGI animation has earned in recent years. But Selick, who says he thinks Coraline could only ever have been made as an independent film, points to the enduring success of Nightmare as proof that stop-motion can have a long and profitable lifespan.
‘I think stop-motion may have a lot more timeless quality than a lot of CG films,’ he says. ‘We can also do these for substantially less ‘ I’m very hopeful about the future, but it’s a film at a time, and we have to see what happens with Coraline.’
