Henry Selick Nearly Finished Coraline

Nightmare Before Christmas Director Adapts Neil Gaiman Bestseller

Aug 19, 2008

Coraline director Henry Selick says the movie is nearly complete, and is on track for its February 6, 2009 release.

Coraline director Henry Selick says the stop-motion animation for the upcoming movie will be finished within 6 weeks, and the film is on time to make its theatrical debut.

"We will complete animation on Coraline in about six weeks and plan a February release of 2009," Selick told Sci Fi Wire.

The movie, produced by Laika Entertainment, follows the titular girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) as she goes through a strange door in her bedroom, and discovers an alternate universe, with alternate parents. These new parents, voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman, are identical to her regular parents, save for the fact that they have buttons sewn over their eyes. Coraline soon finds herself trapped in a web of intrigue and menace, and must somehow escape her new, all-too-loving other parents.

"It's a dark, perfect, modern fairy tale." Selick says about the film. "(It) concerns itself with a primal thought every child considers: I wish I had other parents. That, and the button eyes."

Selick and writer Neil Gaiman (Stardust, Beowulf) worked together on the script, an adaptation of Gaiman's multiple award-winning children's novel of the same name.

"The movie version of Coraline is very faithful to the tone and the spirit of the book," Selick said. "In the translation from book to film there are adjustments to story and character that have to be made. The main thing I always felt was I could not disappoint the readers of the book, and though some details have been changed as well as the order of the sequences, I feel we will be successful."

Of course, many people are already comparing Coraline to Selick's best-known stop-motion film, Tim Burton's classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's simultaneously a boon and a burden for the director, who admits that many animators from the Nightmare team worked with him on the new film.

"There is no doubt that [there are] some similarities between the two projects," he admitted. "I also have many of the original Nightmare team members working on Coraline. We've all grown, and the visual aesthetic is ultimately a very different one. You'll see great animation like Nightmare, like a cousin of Nightmare. More like a second cousin. The last thing I'd want to do would be to try to rip off a classic film I directed."

One of the newest advances assisting the Coraline team is a stereoscopic dual digital camera that according to Selick, makes the stop-motion process easier.

"(It) just gives you more of what is there, just a little more sense of the reality of this medium," he says about his new toy. "It does not live in the computer, nor is it a series of drawings; it's an actual real set (of) puppets."

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