Coraline
Posted on 24/06/2009 in Festival, Homepage 2, Specials
After three long years of production, Coraline is now on Italian screens. The stop-motion feature lenght film is directed by Henry Selick, the stop-motion master who has directed in 1993 The Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and in 1996 James and the Giant Peach.
Selick’s movie is based on Neil Gaiman’s international best-selling book, illustrated by Dave McKean and winner of the Hugo Award.
The movie tells the story of Coraline, a young girl who walks through a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternate version of her life. On the surface, this parallel reality is eerily similar to her real life and every characters has buttons instead of eyes. But when this wondrously off-kilter, fantastical adventure turns dangerous, she wants to return to her real life.
The stop-motion movie, realized with not much digital effects, is the first high definition, stop-motion animated feature to be shot in 3-D. The strereoscopy has been used to give depth to the space as a medium to tell the story.
The movie is produced by Laika, the production company based on Portland. Henry Selick is the Laika’s Supervising Director and in 2005 he realized with Laika his first 3D animation with the short Moogirl.
The supervisor of the characters, Georgina Hayns (she worked also for Tim Burton’s Corpe Bride) brought a lot of innovations in the making of puppets. The staff made use of “replacement” technology to have expressive and smooth faces: the upper and the lower parts of the face have more mobility with this technology and the line that separates the two parts of the face, has been deleted during the post-production.
The animation is depend on voices, in particular the modelling of the mouths is depend on sounds that the characters pronounce. The voices have been previously recorded and after the animators have worked at the faces. Besides Dakota Fanning (voice of Coraline) during the dubbing session, has been photographed to help the animators in the puppets modelling.
Interview with Henry Selick
Here the exclusive interview with Henry Selick: Giulietta Fara (Future Film Festival Director) met the director during the last Annecy animation festival (2009 June).
“I find the stop-motion technique amazing, three of the four movie I directed are stop-motion films. This movie keeps on the big screen the animators’ energy and the hard work of modelling every single characters. At the beginning we thought about the technique for Coraline. In the USA and in other countries there are a lot of companies specialized in 3D animation so we decided to work with the puppets animation to add magic to the Coraline’ story. Every characters have an articulated metal skeleton armature, a silicone face and for the main characters there were hundreds of face expression, in particular for the eyes.”
“I personally decided to shot the movie in 3D, I follow the evolution of the stereoscopy for twenty years. This technique is amazing for the big screen and it has achived high quality levels, but for the TV, we have realized a 2D version of the movie.”
“The screenplay is based on Neil Gaiman’s book but I had to add a lot of things because the novel is too 
short for a feature lenght film. I’m on the same wavelength as Neil Gaiman, he is a friend of mine, so it was not so difficult to rewrite the story”.
“As regards the dubbing, for an animation movie you have to record a lot of takes for every scenes and every dialogues so that all works. I personally directed the actors, and this work has been very difficult because an actor has to dub even if there is nothing in the scene. With Dakota Fanning (the voice of Coraline) we made hundreds of rehearsals. Also my sons joined in the dubbing: they are the ghost-children. The first dubbing section is recorded before the animation so the voices and the timing help the animators to realize the scenes. There is another dub section after the animation so you can put in order the scenes. It’s a very long work, the animators are very patient people”.
by Giulietta Fara
