By Karl Rozemeyer
“This movie has been part of my life for a very long time,” Henry Selick told FilmInk in 2009 of his fourth feature film, Coraline, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s beloved novel. “I first got the unpublished manuscript in 2000, and the book itself wasn’t published for two years. I’ve lived with this for a very long time, and I’ve imagined a frightening amount of detail in the worlds and the characters over that time.” With the film, Selick –the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach – created the first stop-motion animation feature shot in stereoscopic 3-D.
The film’s ominous tagline – “Be careful what you wish for” – was a warning for its young heroine, Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning). Having recently moved to The Pink Palace, a creaky, dilapidated house in an unfamiliar mountainous outpost with dowdy tenants and a scruffy cat, Coraline feels ignored and marginalised by her busy parents. They’re both writers, and are too wrapped up in their daily chores and deadlines to care too much about their daughter’s comings-and-goings. The isolated Coraline then discovers a secret door in the house that leads to an alternate version of her own life. On the other side, all is transformed into a wonderfully off-kilter universe where the neighbours perform all sorts of amazing vaudeville acts, and the pet cat talks. In this seemingly idyllic other world, Coraline’s parents are kind and attentive. Her Other Mother bakes and prepares sumptuous dinners, while her Other Father is funny and engaging and composes entertaining music.
Yet, even at the outset, there is something unsettling about all the characters in her new favourite place: instead of eyes, they have black buttons, like dolls. “They’re all dolls,” Selick says. “If you take button eyes from a doll and put them in a large living doll, then it becomes something frightening. It’s all about taking something very innocent and making it into something dark and evil. Not in a Chucky sort of way, but in a more delicate manner. This other world is a hand-made fantasy just to trap Coraline.”
When the Other Parents try to keep her in their grasp forever, and everything around her begins to decay and morph from a magical fantasy into a nightmarish hellhole, Coraline must draw on her bravery and resourcefulness to take her back home. “I liked that she’s an ordinary girl who faces extraordinary evil, and doesn’t have super powers, or even weapons,” Selick says. “Neil Gaiman is a very seductive writer. It’s almost a universal idea that everyone does imagine a better life, with different parents.”
While the similarity of the story’s basic premise to Alice falling down the rabbit hole and Lucy passing through the closet door in Narnia is obvious, there is a blending of, Selick notes, “Alice In Wonderland with a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s something a little darker that I found refreshing. It’s a new combination of elements, and there are delicious details.”
Interestingly, its narrative is kick-started by neglectful parents who are too busy working to spend time with their daughter, and who inspire the titular heroine to let her mind wander and to discover alternative, more attentive parents existing in a parallel world. “Before even going to children and families, I think anyone artistic or cinematic is gonna love this movie just from the storytelling and how visually beautiful it is,” actress, Teri Hatcher, who voiced Coraline’s real and imagined mothers in the film, told FilmInk in 2009 of Coraline’s possible audience. “For the children, I think eight-years-old and up is fine. Coraline is a great, funky, spunky role model,” she continues. “It’s to do with everything about her: the way she’s dressed, her independence, her courage, her curiosity, her acceptance of her struggle with the attention that she’s not getting, and the lesson that she learns. If you do have a child that’s scared, this could be a great movie to see. ‘Will I ever lose you as a parent?’, ‘Would you ever not love me?’, ‘Would I ever not be able to get back to you?’, ‘Could I be lured to something dangerous?’ – those are things that you should be talking about in your family anyway. If those subjects came up out of the fears of a little kid, then I think it would be good to ignite that communication within your family. That’s what the film’s about – it’s about a family losing each other and having to find each other again. That’s really relatable now; in this economy, and in our busy lives.”
Young Coraline may eventually understand that her parents need to concentrate on making a living to provide her with the things that she needs, but Selick avoids emphasising any moral import. “I don’t like to underline the message too hard,” he says. “Certainly, on the one hand, I like to inspire imagination with younger viewers. So showing them these other worlds that look so amazing is a good, healthy stimulus for their own imaginations. Sure, there is a message underneath it: even if your parents can’t devote themselves to you and wait on you hand and foot, they do love you. The subject of love and families isn’t always pretty. But I didn’t want the mother and father to change into different people in the end. Coraline herself sees them a little differently.”
When Selick first approached producer, Bill Mechanic, with the idea of making a movie of the Neil Gaiman novel, Mechanic initially planned on Coraline being a live action film. “I’m an animator, and I’m very patient,” Selick says. “Over time, I knew that we would make it the animated film that it was meant to be. The challenges were to not let the 3D just be an add-on gimmick, but rather to use it, most importantly, in conjunction with the script. We wanted the story to ultimately draw the audience into this other ‘better’ version of Coraline’s life, as she herself is being seduced by that world.”
Selick realised, however, that even the best technology has its pitfalls, and can become unnecessarily elaborate. Importantly, when Coraline was made, 3D was far less ubiquitous than it is now, and Selick was a little wary of it. “If you overdo the 3D, and if you have things coming out into the audience, you might start amping that up when there’s an action sequence,” Selick said of the then temptations of the format. “That then completely inhibits your ability to edit. All the rules of editing are destroyed. That took quite a while to get used to, but it did teach me to minimise the in-your-face 3D effects. But,” Henry Selick added modestly, “we do go for it in a few places.”
Added Teri Hatcher of the film’s use of 3D. “If you have a choice, obviously the wow factor of the 3D is incredible,” she told FilmInk in 2009. “It’s the best use of 3D ever. It’s organic, it has depth, it has meaning, and it’s not just arbitrary. I’ve never seen anything like it. That said, the storytelling, the music, and the colours still hold up in 2D. The stop-motion animation is art. The cherry blossoms in the film are pieces of popcorn, and the gold flowers were dog toys. Somebody cut 300 dog toys up into the shape of a daisy so that they could make it open and close. It’s not done with a computer. These are artists that went around and thought, ‘What could I make look like a tree in a forest?’ This is truly art.”
Coraline is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital. Kubo And The Two Strings is in cinemas now. Click through for our exclusive interview with Kubo And The Two Strings’ director (and Laika kingpin), Travis Knight.
