![]() It wasn’t a difficult prospect to imagine turning into a film. So everyone imagines a better life is a universal theme and then the delicious details that Neil comes up with and describes so beautifully also triggered my imagination. You might have a friend and you wish that those people were your parents. As a kid, you wish for different parents. I was hooked with the general idea of everyone wishes for a different life at some point in your life. It’s not a big novel, but I couldn’t put it down and I thought the most amazing thing was I could see the movie the first time I read it. I read it immediately, just the timing of how it was, and it’s a short read. So I got the manuscript, it wasn’t yet published. I’d seen glimpses of “Sandman,” a comic series that he had been doing, but I wasn’t overly familiar. ![]() Can you talk about when you first got the manuscript from Neil? Did you immediately start visualizing stuff you wanted to do with it or did you just read it as a regular reader? I know you got the manuscript before the book was even published so you were already well into this before we last talked. It was a short 20 months.ĬS: 20 months does seem short compared to how long it normally takes to develop a CG animated movie. So rather than go quite as long, we added on a few more people to cut the overall shoot time down. It was the biggest crew I’ve ever worked with. It was like a year and a half of pre-production and then 20 months of shooting and then a couple months of post. Henry Selick: There was quite a ways to go. With Dakota Fanning providing the voice of Coraline and Terri Hatcher as both her real mother and the evil “Other Mother,” Selick began what would end up taking almost eight years to complete.Ĭ spoke to Henry roughly four years ago, just before he started production, so it seemed only right we’d sit down to catch up with him as the bookend on the film’s completion.Ĭ: When we spoke four years ago, it seemed like you were at the early stages of developing this, so it’s nice to have a chance to talk to you at the end of that process. It took many years before Selick was able to get the movie off the ground, complicated by the fact that the director wanted to make this the first stop-motion animated feature film to be shot and projected using the latest 3D technology. That’s the way we come up with the most interesting solutions to problems.Long before the novel became a success, director Henry Selick, whose groundbreaking work in stop-motion animation made Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas a perennial classic, was working on adapting the novel as his next project. “If it won’t work we try to mechanically build around it. “We build little mechanical things that give the impression of shape-changing, growing flowers,” says Selick. It’s a bizarre craft.”Īs complicated and huge as the Fantasy Garden set-piece is‚Äîit took two months to plan, two months to build and three months to shoot–Selick insists his animators did everything by hand, per usual, except for one set of CG blue flowers that had to move in I was working with the best artists in the world focused on the stage. “I loved running it, rushing around nudging and coaxing. ( David Strick photographs Coraline’s 50 stages.) Selick employed 30 animators at the film’s peak. One-fourth-scale miniature sets at the gigantic Laika warehouse in Portland, Oregon, an animator would shoot ten seconds of footage. On a good day during three and a half years of filming on fifty or so black-curtained Because Coraline was in almost every shot, the production went through 20 Coraline puppets. Who uses mangled stand-in puppets for lighting and blocking camera rehearsals. (Some seams are painted out in post-production.) “We made huge strides with expression‚” says Selick, ![]() The puppets are built on a delicate metal skeleton armature they have plastic silicon skin and hand-made costumes and replaceable heads stored in trays with a range of expressions: scowls, smiles, pouty lips. The real mother (but with better skin), a taller angry Mother and the final There are three versions of Coraline‚Äôs Other Mother: one close to The 41 Best Animated Movies of the 21st Century, Ranked 'The Bob's Burgers Movie': Behind the Musical Spectacle of the Animated Big-Screen Spinoffįrom 'Reality Bites' to 'Fatal Attraction,' Keep Track of All the Upcoming Film-to-TV Adaptations (Of course all is not as it seems.)Īnimation Legend Bill Plympton on How Pixar Has Fostered a Current 'Second Golden Age of Animation' Parallel universe where another set of fantasy parents play and cook andĬultivate a fabulous garden. Miserably lonely in her family’s ramshackle new house in the countryĪnd neglected by her workaholic parents, 11-year-old Coraline seeks refuge in a
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