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| Coraline Book Cover |
“How
can you walk away from something and then come towards it?” When
Coraline Jones’ reality is suddenly twisted, this little 11 year old,
played by Dakota Fanning, must separate reality from acceptable fiction
and truth from sinister lies in this fantasy thriller children’s movie.
Coraline’s parents, played by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman, help her
figure out which reality best suits her. The 2009 film Coraline was shot in stereoscopic 3D stop-motion animation and directed by Henry Selick, also the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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| Coraline travels to the "other" world. |
Similarly
based on Neil Gaiman’s book, Coraline is about a girl with bright blue
hair and sparkling eyes. Although she was forced to leave her friends and move from Pontiac,
Michigan to the Pink Palace of Ashland, Oregon, Coraline tried to make the best of her new
life. In search of something to do on a cold and rainy day, Coraline
explores the woods outside her home, making friends with the neighbor boy Wybie, played by Robert Bailey Jr.. When he gets called inside by his grandmother, owner of the Pink Palace, Coraline decides to explore this new home and finds a door which had been locked and covered
in wallpaper. Although she finds the other side of the door to be a
brick wall, later that night she finds the bricks replaced by a magical
gateway to a parallel universe. Coraline enjoys what this new world has
to offer, but she is skeptical of its appearing consequences. Her very
talkative friend, Wybie, is fixed by her “other” Mother in order to make
the new world more appealing to Coraline. In this so called “other”
life, Coraline’s “other” Mother and “other” Father are the complete
opposite of her real mom and dad. Her “other” Mother is a fabulous cook
and her “other” Father writes music for her. Although she loves the new
perks of this parallel universe, Coraline is soon faced with the
decision of her life. She can either live in this world made for her
with the consequences of having her eyes removed and replaced with
little black buttons, or she can try to leave with the consequence of
having to save the people already trapped in the other world. Coraline’s
journey through a hardship in a delicate time of her life proves her
perseverance and dedication to find who she is and the life she wants.
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| Coraline Puppet |
Unlike most movies, Coraline
was filmed in stop-motion using creatively designed, handmade puppets.
Each puppet has everything a human actor would have: the luxurious
wardrobe and thousands of facial expressions. The wardrobe for a puppet
has to consist of duplicates of each item in order to film a scene that
involves dirt or any added effect. Coraline had 6,300 facial replacement
pieces and 207,000 total facial expression combinations. Similarly, 28
Coraline dolls were created by 10 people in 4 months. The extent of work
that went into these puppets shows the dedication of the design crew in
creating this film.
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| Filming of Coraline |
The
technique behind the 3D stop-motion animations makes the movie
exceptional to watch. Stop-motion is the combining of many still
pictures to create motion. For every one second of film in Coraline, 30+
still pictures were taken. Every time the animator takes a picture,
they move objects in the scene a fraction of a millimeter in order to
create a moving effect. This movie was also shot in 3D. To give the
illusion of 3D, every time a picture was taken the camera moved left to
take another picture. The distance between the pictures is the width
between Coraline’s eyes. They used that as a measuring tool because the
puppets are so small that using the width between human eyes would be
unproportional. The 3D stop-motion animators brought the puppets to life
with camera technique.
Due
to my lack of animated film watching, I was surprised when the movie
was over. I had never watched a “puppet movie”. I did, however, love the
movie. Because of the strange idea behind Coraline, I would not recommend this movie to children under the age of 10.
