Coraline (film)

Coraline is a 2009 American animated gothic dark fantasy horror film written for the screen and directed by Henry Selick, based on the 2002 novella Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Produced by Laika, as the studio's first feature film, it features the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, John Hodgman, Robert Bailey Jr., and Ian McShane. 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.
Just as Gaiman was finishing his novella, he met Selick and invited him to make a film adaptation, as Gaiman was a fan of Selick's other stop-motion works, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996), both with Tim Burton. When Selick thought that a direct adaptation would lead to "maybe a 47-minute movie", the screenplay was expanded. Looking for a design different from that of most animation, Selick 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, as in The Wizard of Oz. To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions. Production of the stop-motion animation took place at a warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Coraline premiered at the Portland International Film Festival on February 5, 2009, and was released theatrically in the United States on February 6 by Focus Features. The film was met with widespread acclaim from critics and grossed $125.5 million; several theatrical re-releases over the years raised its box office total to $185.9 million worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time, following 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 was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
Eleven-year-old Coraline Jones and her parents, Charlie and Mel, move from Pontiac, Michigan, into the Pink Palace Apartments, an old Victorian house in Ashland, Oregon. While searching for an old well, she meets a black cat and Wyborn "Wybie" Lovat, the grandson of Coraline's landlady, who gives her a rag doll that eerily resembles her. Since her parents are busy with work, Coraline entertains herself by exploring the house, discovering a small door with a brick wall behind it in the living room. That night, she opens the door and finds that the brick wall has been replaced by a tunnel, which leads her to an "Other World", where her parents' button-eyed doppelgängers lavish her with delicious food and their attention.
Upon waking in the morning, Coraline finds herself back in the real world. She meets her neighbors: Mr. Bobinsky, an eccentric Chernobyl liquidator-turned-gymnast who owns a mouse circus, and retired burlesque performers April Spink and Miriam Forcible. Wybie tells Coraline his grandmother's twin sister disappeared when they were children.
Coraline returns to the Other World that night, where she meets a mute Other Wybie. When she returns yet again, the cat, who can travel between the worlds, arrives and warns her about the Other World. The Other Mother offers Coraline to stay in the Other World forever, on the condition that buttons are sewn onto her eyes. Horrified, Coraline desperately tries to return to her side of the home, but she remains in the Other World. When Coraline tries to escape through the door, the Other Mother imprisons her in a dark room through a mirror.
There, three ghost children, one of whom Coraline recognizes as the landlady's missing sister, tell Coraline that the Other Mother is an evil entity called the "Beldam", who used rag dolls to spy on their unhappy lives and lure them into the Other World with treats and games. They allowed her to sew buttons over their eyes, and she subsequently locked their souls inside the mirror. After Coraline promises to help the ghost children by retrieving their eyes, the Other Wybie helps her escape through the passageway home.
Back in the real world, Wybie asks Coraline to return the doll, as it belonged to his grandmother's missing sister. She attempts to explain the situation to him, but he disbelieves her and runs out in fear. Coraline borrows an adder stone from Spink and Forcible, and after the cat informs her that the Beldam has kidnapped her parents, the duo set out to rescue them. Knowing that the Beldam has a penchant for games, Coraline proposes a deal: if she finds her parents and the eyes of the ghost children, the Beldam will set them all free; if not, she will stay and allow the Beldam to sew the buttons on her eyes.
As Coraline finds and collects each of the missing eyes using the adder stone, she frees the spirits of the ghost children and the Other World begins to fade until all three are collected and only the house remains. The Beldam, now in her spider-like true form, challenges Coraline to find her parents. Realizing they are trapped in a nearby snow globe and that the Beldam will not let her go, she throws the cat to distract her before taking the snow globe and narrowly escaping through the door with the ghost children's help, severing one of the Beldam's hands in the process. Coraline's parents return with no recollection of their capture and she warmly embraces them.
At night, the ghosts warn Coraline that the Beldam is still after the key. As Coraline heads toward the backyard well to dispose of it, the Beldam's severed hand sneaks into the real world and attempts to drag her back to the Other World. Wybie, having realized Coraline was right, comes to the rescue and destroys the hand before they both throw the key and the hand down the well. The next day, the Jones family hosts a garden party for the Pink Palace residents. Wybie brings his grandmother to the party, and Coraline begins to tell her about her missing sister's fate.
Director Henry Selick met author Neil Gaiman just as Gaiman was finishing the novel Coraline, which was published in 2002, and as Gaiman was a fan of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), he invited him to make a 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 is only mentioned in the novel as the boy who lived in the house before Coraline. The character was expanded in order to not make it seem like Coraline was talking to herself all the time. When looking for a design different 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, as in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Uesugi said: "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 m) 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 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 the 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 could exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. In the "Hidden Worlds: The Films of LAIKA" exhibit at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture, the sign for "Replacing Faces" display said there were 207,336 possible face combinations for Coraline and 17,633 for her mother. Selick wanted to leave the seams in the characters' faces to show the handmade nature of the puppets, but Laika owner Phil Knight requested that the seams be removed digitally. There were 28 identical puppets of Coraline. 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 their elements, which had to look handcrafted, not 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 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG), directed by Dan Casey, and more than 250 technicians and designers. Principal photography took 18 months. 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 take anywhere from six weeks to six months to complete. The clothes also simulated wear using paint and a file.
The soundtrack for Coraline features songs by 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 band's singers. The band was hired to write an entire soundtrack for the film, but according to John Flansburgh, the production team "wanted the music to be more creepy", and only one song was ultimately used. Coulais's score was performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and features choral pieces sung by the Children's Choir of Nice in a nonsense language. The main soloist, a young girl heard 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.
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 grossing $125 million worldwide. Before the film's release, Dergarabedian thought Laika Studios "should be pleased" was 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.
The film was re-released on August 14, 2023, grossing over $7 million over four days. Due its 15th anniversary, it was re-released the following year in 3D on August 16, 2024, and made $12.5 million in four days, finishing fifth at the box office. By August 23, the 2024 re-release had grossed $29.2 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing re-release in the history of Fathom Events. As of September 24, 2024, the re-release had grossed $52.4 million worldwide, bringing the film's lifetime total gross to $185.7 million worldwide. The 15th anniversary re-release became the second highest grossing re-release of a film of all time in the UK. It also earned more than its initial box gross from 2009 release in Mexico.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 91% based on 279 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website's critics 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." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100 based on reviews from 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times 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 of New York magazine 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."
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 two-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.
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.