Coraline (film)

Coraline (film)
Coraline is a 2009 American stop motion animated dark fantasy horror film written and directed by Henry Selick, based on Neil Gaiman's novella of the same name. Produced by LAIKA, as the studio's first feature film, it features the voice talents of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, John Hodgman, Robert Bailey Jr., and Ian McShane. The musical score was composed by Bruno Coulais. The film tells the story of its eponymous character discovering an idealized alternate universe behind a secret door in her new home, unaware that it contains something dark and sinister. Her friends, a boy named Wybie and a stray black cat, help her set things right and become closer to her parents.
Just as Gaiman was finishing his novella in 2002, he met Selick and invited him to make a film adaptation, as Gaiman was a fan of Selick's other stop-motion projects, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). When Selick thought that a direct adaptation would lead to "maybe a 47-minute movie", the screenplay had some expansions, like the introduction of Wybie, who was not present in the original novel. Selick, looking for a design away from that of most animation, discovered the work of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi and invited him to become the concept artist. His biggest influences were on the color palette, which was muted in the real world and more colorful in the Other World, similar to The Wizard of Oz (1939). To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions. Production of the stop-motion animation feature took place at a warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon (near Portland).
The film was theatrically released in the United States on February 6, 2009, by Focus Features after a world premiere at the Portland International Film Festival on February 5, and received critical acclaim. The film grossed $16.85 million during its opening weekend, ranking third at the box office, and by the end of its run had grossed over $124 million worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time after Chicken Run (2000) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). The film won Annie Awards for Best Music in an Animated Feature Production, Best Character Design in an Animated Feature Production and Best Production Design in an Animated Feature Production, and received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film. It has developed a cult following in the years since its release, and has been considered one of the greatest animated films in modern times. It later premiered on Cartoon Network in Latin America. With the production of Coraline, Laika would become the first company to make a feature-length film using replacement faces made by a 3D printer.
Plot
Coraline Jones has to adapt to life in the Pink Palace apartments, an old house in Ashland, Oregon, after moving from Pontiac, Michigan. Her stay-at-home parents, Charlie and Mel, have to work and ignore her. She crosses paths with a black cat and Wyborne (or "Wybie"), the landlady's grandson, who leaves her a ragdoll lookalike. It leads Coraline to a small door with a brick wall behind it. That night, a jumping mouse leads Coraline back to the door, now a portal leading to the Other World, an alternate universe where her parents button-eyed doppelgängers lavish her with food and attention.
Upon waking, Coraline has returned to the real world. Wybie recounts how his great aunt disappeared. Coraline meets the other residents of the Pink Palace: upstairs, the Amazing Bobinsky, an eccentric Russian liquidator-turned-gymnast who owns a mouse circus; and downstairs, retired burlesque performers April Spink and Miriam Forcible. Bobinsky and Ms. Spink (who reads tea leaves for Coraline) warn her about the Other World.
Coraline goes back nonetheless by purposely baiting the jumping mice with cheese and sees that her Other Father has a wonderful garden. The Other Wybie, who is mute, accompanies her to see the Other Bobinsky's dancing circus mice. When Coraline returns again to the Other World, this time during the day, the cat tells her he can traverse the two worlds. She watches the Others Ms. Spink and Forcible perform. Afterwards, the Other Mother offers to let her stay permanently if she has buttons sewn over her eyes which horrifies Coraline. She desperately tries to fall asleep and even after waking remains in the Other World. When she tries to escape back through the door to her world, the Other Mother half-transforms into an arachnid-like form and imprisons her by throwing her into a mirror that leads to a dark room.
There, three ghost children, including Wybie's great aunt, tell Coraline how the Beldam (the Other Mother) used the ragdolls to spy on them. After sewing buttons over their eyes, the Beldam devoured their souls. Coraline can free them by retrieving the essences of their souls, trapped in the "eyes" of the ghost children. After promising to help them, the Other Wybie helps her return home.
The Beldam has kidnapped her parents, forcing Coraline to return to the Other World with a Ouija planchette from Ms. Spink. The cat suggests Coraline propose a game: if she can find her parents and the three "eyes", the Beldam will let them all go free; if not, Coraline will finally accept the Beldam's offer. As Coraline finds each "eye", parts of the Other World turn lifeless as the entire dimension gradually disintegrates. During the search, Coraline encounters the clothes that the Other Wybie was wearing on a flag pole, implying that the Beldam killed him for helping her escape before.
The Beldam has assumed her final form. The ghost of Wybie's great aunt warns that the Beldam will not honor her bargain. Coraline tricks her into opening the door to the real world by claiming that Coraline's parents are behind it. Coraline throws the cat at her and takes the snow globe with her imprisoned parents, and the cat claws out the Beldam's eyes. As a last resort, the Beldam creates a giant spider's web in the floor. Coraline narrowly escapes through the door, severing the Beldam's hand.
The snow globe back home is broken and Coraline reunites with her parents. They have no recollection of the ordeal, but having finished their writing, they are nice to Coraline. Her mother buys her the gloves that she always wanted and they do plan a garden party. That night, the freed ghosts warn Coraline that the Beldam is trying to get the key to the small door. When Coraline goes to the well to get rid of it, the Beldam's severed hand attacks her, trying to pull her back to the small door in the house. Wybie comes to the rescue and destroys the hand with a large rock, so that they can finally get rid of the key. The next day, all the residents of the Pink Palace apartments come to the party. Wybie brings his grandmother, so that Coraline can reveal her missing sister's fate.
Voice cast
Dakota Fanning as Coraline Jones
Teri Hatcher as Melanie "Mel" Jones and The Beldam (also known as The Other Mother)
Jennifer Saunders as April Spink and her Other World counterpart
Dawn French as Miriam Forcible and her Other World counterpart
John Hodgman as Charlie Jones and The Other Father
John Linnell provides the Other Father's singing voice
Robert Bailey Jr. as Wyborne "Wybie" Lovat
Keith David as The Cat
Ian McShane as Sergei Alexander Bobinsky and his Other World counterpart
Carolyn Crawford as Mrs. Lovat
Aankha Neal, George Selick, and Hannah Kaiser as the Ghost Children
Marina Budovsky and Harry Selick as Coraline's friends back in Pontiac, Michigan
Production
Director Henry Selick met author Neil Gaiman just as Gaiman was finishing the novel Coraline, and given that Gaiman was a fan of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, he invited him to make a possible film adaptation. As Selick thought a direct adaptation would lead to "maybe a 47-minute movie", his screenplay had some expansions, such as the creation of Wybie, who was not present in the original novel. When looking for a design away from that of most animation, Selick discovered the work of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi and invited him to become the concept artist. One of Uesugi's biggest influences was on the color palette, which was muted in reality and more colorful in the Other World, similar to The Wizard of Oz. Uesugi declared that "at the beginning, it was supposed to be a small project over a few weeks to simply create characters; however, I ended up working on the project for over a year, eventually designing sets and backgrounds, on top of drawing the basic images for the story to be built upon."
Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m2) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon. The stage was divided into 50 lots, which played host to nearly 150 sets. Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The Amazing Garden scene was the most complicated set created for the film. The hundreds of handmade flowers were created to grow and move accordingly for when Coraline entered the garden. More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week. To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.
Every object on screen was made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions, and the characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. There were 28 identical Coraline puppets made. Each one took 3-4 months to make and usually took 10 people to construct each one.
Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own, which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.
At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG), directed by Dan Casey, and more than 250 technicians and designers. The principal photography took 18 months to make. One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair. A single garment could have taken anywhere from six weeks to six months to complete. The clothes also simulated wear using paint and a file.
Music
The soundtrack for Coraline features songs composed by French composer Bruno Coulais, with one ("Other Father Song") by They Might Be Giants. The Other Father's singing voice is provided by John Linnell, one of the singers from the band. They had initially written 10 songs for the film; when a melancholy tone was decided, all but one were cut. Coulais' score was performed by the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra and features choral pieces sung by the Children's Choir of Nice in a nonsense language. Selick mentions that the main soloist, "a young girl you hear singing in several parts of the film," is coincidentally named Coraline. Coraline won Coulais the 2009 Annie Award for best score for an animated feature.
Reception
Box office
According to Paul Dergarabedian, a film business analyst with Media by Numbers, for the film to succeed it needed a box office comparable to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which had grossed $16 million its opening weekend and ended up making more than $192 million worldwide; prior to the film's release, Dergarabedian thought Laika Studios "should be really pleased" were Coraline to make $10 million in its opening weekend. In its US opening weekend, the film grossed $16.85 million, ranking third at the box office. It made $15 million during its second weekend, bringing its U.S. total up to $35.6 million, $25.5 million of which came from 3D presentations. As of November 2009, the film has grossed $75,286,229 in the United States and Canada and $49,310,169 in other territories, for a total of $124,596,398 worldwide.
The film was re-released on August 14, 2023, where it grossed $4.91 million over two days.
Critical response
On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 271 reviews, with an average rating of 7.80/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "With its vivid stop-motion animation combined with Neil Gaiman's imaginative story, Coraline is a film that's both visually stunning and wondrously entertaining." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100 based on reviews from 38 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
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." David Edelstein said the film is "a bona fide fairy-tale" that needed a "touch less entrancement and a touch more ... story." A. O. Scott of The New York Times called the film "exquisitely realized", with a "slower pace and a more contemplative tone than the novel. It is certainly exciting, but rather than race through ever noisier set pieces toward a hectic climax in the manner of so much animation aimed at kids, Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling."
Accolades
Home media
The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United States on July 21, 2009, by Universal Studios Home Entertainment. A 3-D version comes with four sets of 3-D glasses—specifically the green-magenta anaglyph image. Coraline was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2009. A 3-D version of the film was also released on a 2-Disc Collector's Edition. The DVD opened to first week sales of 1,036,845 and over $19 million in revenue. Total sales stand at over 2.6 million units and over $45 million in revenue. A two-disc Blu-ray 3D set, which includes a stereoscopic 3D on the first disc and an anaglyph 3D image, was released in 2011. A new edition from Shout! Factory under license from Universal was released on August 31, 2021. The film was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on December 13, 2022.
Video game
The website for Coraline involves an interactive exploration game where the player can scroll through Coraline's world. It won the 2009 Webby Award for "Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics", both by the people and the Webby organization. It was also nominated for the Webby "Movie and Film" category. On June 16, 2008, D3 Publisher announced the release of a video game based on the film. It was developed by Papaya Studio for the Wii and PlayStation 2 and by Art Co. for Nintendo DS. It was released on January 27, 2009, close to the film's theatrical release. The soundtrack was released digitally February 3, 2009, by E1 Music, and in stores on February 24, 2009.
See also
List of ghost films
References
External links
2009 films
2009 horror films
2009 animated films
2009 fantasy films
2000s ghost films
2009 3D films
3D animated films
2000s children's films
2000s American animated films
American animated horror films
American children's animated fantasy films
American ghost films
American 3D films
Clay animation films
Animated films about witchcraft
2000s stop-motion animated films
American dark fantasy films
American fantasy drama films
American horror drama films
Animated films about cats
Animated films about children
Children's horror films
Films set in Oregon
Films shot in Oregon
Films based on horror novels
Films based on fantasy novels
Films based on works by Neil Gaiman
Laika (company) animated films
Focus Features animated films
Focus Features films
Films directed by Henry Selick
Films based on short fiction
Films about parallel universes
Films produced by Bill Mechanic
Films set in apartment buildings
Animated films based on British novels
Annecy Cristal for a Feature Film winners
American supernatural drama films
American supernatural horror films
American animated feature films
Films scored by Bruno Coulais
Supernatural fantasy films
Talking animals in fiction
2000s English-language films