The Case of Coraline (2009)
Well friends, the air has cooled and the leaves are turning, and once again we’ve found ourselves in October Country. Which of course means that it’s time to get a little spooky! This week, we’re kicking off our October episodes with a delightfully strange animated film that pushed the boundaries of stop-motion: Coraline!
Coraline premiered in 2009 as the debut feature of LAIKA, a fledgling animation studio born from the defunct Will Vinton Studios. Despite the fact that Coraline was based on a best-selling book, the dark subject matter and the stop-motion medium meant that the film would be a major risk to produce. Not to mention the fact that it came from a studio with little-to-no name recognition with audiences. But, LAIKA pushed ahead, developing a dark and unusual masterpiece that resonated with millions of people. It was a film that proved once again that animation isn’t just for children, but that children and adults can both appreciate the artform. It also opened the door for more off-beat and spooky content.
So, let’s venture back to The Pink Palace and revisit the twisted tale of Coraline!
Before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about the studio that brought Coraline to life.
A while back, we did an episode about the history of LAIKA, a stop-motion animation studio that has produced films like ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. It was born from the defunct Will Vinton Studios, an animation house known best for its groundbreaking work in “claymation,” especially in advertising. Possibly their most famous creations were the California Raisins, although they also developed the MM characters and animated popular Chips Ahoy commercials.
Phil Knight, the co-founder of NIKE, acquired the studio in the early 2000s. He dismissed Will Vinton, who then sued Knight. Ultimately Will Vinton lost his studio and the rights to nearly three decades of work.
Phil Knight’s son Travis had been working at the studio as an animator and had shown incredible talent for the medium. He was given a position on the board of the new company, which was rebranded to LAIKA, and he would eventually become the CEO.
In 2009, LAIKA produced their first major motion picture. It was a success, and the studio continues to innovate stop-motion animation.
Summary
Coraline Jones and her parents have just moved into The Pink Palace, a large multi-family house in Ashland, Oregon. Having just left all of her friends, Coraline feels lonely. But, her parents hardly have any time to spend with their daughter. So, she explores her new home and meets a boy named Wybie, a cat, and a handful of colorful neighbors. While exploring, Coraline comes across a mysterious door in the wall that leads to nowhere. At night, a mouse wakes Coraline and leads her back to the door, which now opens in another dimension; a world similar to her own, but different in all the best ways…or so it seems.
Making of
Coraline is based on a 2002 novella of the same name by Niel Gaiman. While he was writing the book, Gaiman contacted Henry Selick and told him that he would like him to direct an adaptation of the story.
Henry Selick is an esteemed director best known for his stop-motion films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He took on the task of adapting Coraline to the screen, and started by writing the screenplay.
Selick knew that a true adaptation of the story would be too short, so he added details and characters. For example, Wybie, Coraline’s friend, was invented for the film so that the main character would have someone to talk to.
Wybie’s grandmother is another character that was added to the film to deepen the lore surrounding the Beldam, the shapeshifting creature that feasts on the souls of children. Henry Selick thought it would make sense to add a character that experienced the evil and the trauma of the Beldam in the past, which gives the story a layer of history.
In the film, it is revealed that Wybie’s great aunt was taken by the Beldam when she was a child.
Selick extended the story by having Coraline visit the other world three times. In the original story, she saw through the facade during her first visit, but in the film, it takes her more time to notice the problems. Because of this, the Coraline of the movie had to be even more lonesome and disregarded than the character of the book. So, her parents are seemingly more cruel in the film than they are in the book.
Among other smaller changes, Selick also moved the location of the story to Oregon, which is known for its miserable, rainy winters. He had no idea at the time that he himself would be moving to Oregon to join the team at LAIKA.
For some time, Henry Selick thought Coraline might have to be a live-action film. But when LAIKA contacted him about a collaboration, he knew that stop-motion was a possibility.
There was a lot of uncertainty about whether or not the studio should go all-in on stop-motion animation. Just before Phil Knight took over Will Vinton Studios, the company was producing a lot of CG animation as well. The team discussed the possibility of making Coraline a hybrid film, with the “real” world portrayed in computer generated animation while the other world would be portrayed in stop-motion. But ultimately, the style didn’t quite work. According to Henry Selick, it was Travis Knight who cast the deciding vote to make the film all stop-motion animation.
Besides the fact that stop-motion is costly and time-consuming, LAIKA also knew that the premise of their movie wouldn’t be popular. A creepy animated film marketed to children, starring a girl who isn’t a princess? It wasn’t going to go over well with investors. But, Universal and Focus Features ultimately agreed to produce and distribute the project.
It took about 4 years to complete shooting on Coraline. This was the work of roughly 35 animators creating between 2.22 and 6.52 seconds of animation a week.
Each second of the film consists of 24 frames, each of which was shot twice due to the 3D film-making process. Each animator acts as a performer, playing out the scene with their puppet in every second of animation. Once they commit to a movement, they can’t change it or else they will have to start over, much like a live performance.
There were multiple copies of each puppet. They consisted of metal armatures covered in silicone. Henry Selick wanted each character to look stylized, and he designed Coraline first.
She was by far the most difficult character to create, but the rest of the characters were sort of created in her style. She had about 28 puppets with 200,000 different facial expressions. The top of her face, like the rest of the doll faces, stayed in place while the bottom half would snap on and off for a quick transition. The line separating the top and bottom of the faces was later painted out in post production.
One of the most complex pieces of Coraline was her hair. While most of the characters have stagnate hair that doesn’t move very much, Coraline’s hair is fibrous and blows in the wind. In order to achieve this, LAIKA brought in Suzanne Moulton, who acted as the hair and fur fabricator for the movie. Suzanne lined Coraline’s synthetic hair with wire and super glue until almost every strand was controllable. The wires were the same color blue as the hair, so they are invisible in the film.
Coraline is also unique because she was essentially the first stop-motion character to have an entire wardrobe. Throughout the film, she wears 9 outfits, all sewn by an entire costume department led by Deborah Cook. The fabrics were screen-printed to fit perfectly on each of the dolls so that the patterns would match up exactly the same every time. The team would use medical tools to add the microscopic elements to each piece of clothing, like zippers, rivets, seems, or buttons.
The costume department also had to add a foam core underneath the clothes of each character so that they wouldn’t sag around the armature. This simulated the business of a raincoat or pajamas.
There could be up to 45 versions of a single outfit, depending on what happens in the scene where Coraline wears it. Because she wears her pajamas for a large portion of the movie, there were versions of it that were covered in mud, torn, and worn down with files.
For Coraline’s knitted accessories and sweaters, LAIKA employed Althea Crome, an artist that specializes in miniature knitted clothing. She knitted Coraline’s sweaters and the character’s gloves.
For the visual tone of Coraline, Henry Selick took inspiration from a Japanese illustrator named Tadahiro Uesugi, who was heavily influenced by 1950s advertising illustration.
This pure and simple style shows through in Coraline’s world, especially in the muted colors. Selick wanted everything to appear delicate, but not dead.
Henry Selick was the production designer, and he had a team of art directors, set designers, and set builders that created about 150 different sets. When Coraline first enters the other world from her own world, it seems like the two worlds are essentially the same. But in reality, the sets for the other world were made to be bigger and less constrictive so that Coraline would feel less confined in the space.
One of the most breathtaking sequences is the scene where Coraline sees the garden in the other world. Fifteen different sets were created for the “ghost eye garden” and the “fantastic” gardens alone. The sets were covered in thousands of paper flowers.
At one point, we see hundreds of flowers bloom as Coraline passes by. This was actually just one flower that was filmed from all angles and then digitally reproduced in the film.
Many of the other flowers in the garden were designed to have fiberoptic pieces that glowed when the animators shown their flashlights from the bottom of the set. They applied different gels to the lights to give them different colors.
Because Coraline is a stop-motion animated film, it mostly uses practical special effects. There were, however, some visual effects used in the movie as well.
Every fire seen in the movie was hand-drawn by visual effects animator John Allen Armstrong. He created 1200 drawings in about 3-4 weeks. His work is most prominently featured in a scene when a doll gets thrown into a fireplace. The stop-motion animators filmed the sequence first with the doll “burning up,” and Armstrong animated the fire around it later.
There was an entire team of people dedicated to making the fog in Coraline appear real and reactive with the characters. They achieved this effect by filming dry ice and manipulating it. They would stand in the fog cloud and mimic motions that the characters made in the film, and they would capture the fog at that specific moment to edit into the scene.
Dakota Fanning was the first person cast in Coraline as the main character. Henry Selick chose the rest of the cast around the young actress, making sure each actor had good chemistry with the film’s star.
Dakota Fanning was well-known as a child actress, especially for roles in films like, I am Sam, The Secret Life of Bees, and My Neighbor Totoro (in the US dub.)
Fanning grew up while voicing Coraline. When Selick met her for the first time, she was only 9 years old. By the time the film was completed, she was 15. There were long breaks between her recording sessions, but she would always get back into character after Selick reminded her that her character was from Pontiac, MI and had a specific midwestern accent.
Teri Hatcher voiced Coraline’s mom/ Other Mother. Teri revealed it was harder for her to play the real mother because the character is so distant and cold. She herself being a mother, it was hard not to bring more warmth in that role. Teri is known for the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies and the show Desperate Housewives.
Coraline’s dad/ Other Dad is voiced by John Hodgman. John has been in things like Baby Mama and several tv shows where he appeared for just a few episodes. These shows include Archer, Adventure Time, and Parks and Recreation.
The cat that is able to comfortably walk through both worlds was voiced by Keith David. You may recognize him from Armageddon, The Thing (from 1982) and his voice from The Princess and the Frog as Dr. Facilier.
Wybie is Coraline’s friend, though she may deny that in the beginning. He is voiced by Robert Bailey Jr. Robert has appeared in films such as The Happening, Dragonfly, and Bubble Boy.
Miss Forcible and Miss Spink are retired Burlesque dancers who share the rent for the bottom level of The Pink Palace. Miss Forcible needs glasses and has a very hard time seeing what is right in front of her. Dawn French voices Forcible and is known for being the lady in the painting in the Harry Potter films, and voicing Mrs. Beaver in the 2005 Chronicles of Narnia.
Miss Spink, who warns Coraline of the impending danger, is voiced by Jennifer Saunders. Jennifer is a well known comedian in the UK, especially for her character of Edina Monsoon, and has been doing the fundraiser “Comic Relief” for many years now.
The pair is also well known to be a comedy duo as French and Saunders.
Coraline’s mouse-training upstairs neighbor, Mr. Sergei Bobinsky, is voiced by Ian McShane. McShane is known for his roles in John Wick as Winston, Pirates of the Caribbean as Blackbeard, and Kung Fu Panda as the snow leopard Tai Lung.
Music
Henry Selick would put temporary music with his drawings, including pieces by composer Bruno Coulais from a film called Microcosmos, which is about insect life. Henry thought it went well with Coraline, and he met with Bruno in LA before sending him some animatics. Bruno got to work on a score for Coraline.
Bruno enjoyed the idea of working on a movie where he had plenty of time to create the music, because the production is much longer than a typical film. He said that though they were very apart in distance, he felt that creatively they were close.
The score was recorded in Paris, France and Budapest, Hungary; the children’s choir recorded portions of the soundtrack in Nice, France. The mixing was done at Skywalker Sound in California.
It was important to Bruno to design his own orchestration. He said, “Depending on the density of sequence, sometimes I will have just a few instruments -- strange instruments like the water phone. It’s a metallic percussion where you put water on a kind of basin with a tube and a bowl. You can play notes on it, and it’s a strange, beautiful, very deep sound. I used this in the movie [for the scenes with the] Other Mother. At the very beginning I wanted the music to be quiet but with strange sounds. I used a string quartet, a lot of percussion, and there is a very special sequence -- the marching band of the mice circus -- where I tried to be at the scale of the mice, so I used toys and Chinese instruments along with traditional marching band instruments.”
When Coraline first arrives in the other world, her “other father” sings to her. His singing voice is provided by John Linnell, of the popular band “They Might Be Giants.” The band wrote the song for the film and reportedly wrote other songs for the film, but this was the only one that made the final cut.
Reception
In its opening weekend, Coraline grossed over $16 million, ranking third at the box office and would go on to gross over $125 million worldwide.
Over time the film would gain a cult following, prompting the entertainment company Fathom Events to re-show the film in select theaters, garnering an additional $7 million in 2023 and $12.5 million in 2024. This film is (as of August 2024) the most successful and highest-grossing re-release in Fathom Events’ history.
Coraline has a 91% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes across a whopping 279 reviews, pointing out the vivid and impressive stop-motion animation saying that it is “ both visually stunning and wondrously entertaining.”
Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, calling it "a beautiful film about several nasty people" as well as "nightmare fodder for children, however brave, under a certain age."
The film was all over the award season getting 46 nominations and 8 wins. 26 of those nominations were for best animated feature.
Some of the awards won include: Best Feature at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Best Feature at the Children’s BAFTA Awards and both Best Character Design and Music at the Annie Awards.
In an interview directly after accepting the BAFTA award, Henry Selick said it was the heaviest award he’d ever gotten. He linked that to the reason he likes working with stop motion so much saying unlike drawn or CG animation, the characters are real and can be touched, just like the award trophy.
Fun Facts
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Coraline! The film was just re-released in theaters, and moviegoers can even see it once again in 3D.
You can see Henry Selick’s face on the money handed to the mover for a tip.
In the book the door is bigger, but Henry Selick’s Grandmother had a door in her attic that looked just like the one designed for the movie!
He set the movie in Ashland, Oregon which is known for its Shakespeare Festival because of the actresses living in The Pink Palace.
If you look carefully it appears that Mr. Bobinsky is wearing a badge that resembles the badge given to participants who cleaned up the Chernobyl disaster. Though Selick has said that Bobinsky’s blue skin is the result of being out in the cold for long periods, many have speculated that it is due to being exposed to radiation.
Pete Kozachik, director of photography, created a special camera to film this stop motion for 3D. To achieve Stereoscopic vision they hooked the cameras up to automatic stereo slide mounts that would shoot a second frame every time they moved the puppets. Having these two frames simulated the vision of two different eyes.
Conclusion
Much like stop-motion itself, Coraline is a film that we always come back to. Sure, it’s a little off-beat and it might not be for everyone, but it’s a movie that knows its audience and it delivers an experience that you’re not likely to forget.
Even today, creating dark and spooky content suitable for all ages is a risky move. But fifteen years ago? Let’s just say it was a bold choice. So often we want to shield children from stories that will scare them, even if those stories contain characters and themes that they can relate to and that might help them navigate the challenges of their own lives. But Coraline is the type of film that reminds us about the value in fear, and how to find the strength to overcome it.
So if you’re looking for the perfect film to get in the creepy mood for this spooky season, look for no OTHER than Coraline. After all, she’s a peach, she's a doll, she's a pal of mine.