In Part #1 of this series, award-winning author Neil Gaiman (American Gods, The Graveyard Book) discussed how he approached director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) with the novella that would eventually become the stop-motion film Coraline, coming out February 6th.
In this round-table interview, Gaiman talks about altered and new characters in Henry Selick's version of Coraline, how computer-generated images were actually used in the film, and his feelings when he sees his stories translated into other media.
One of the biggest differences between the book and the movie was the addition of Wigbourne. Was that Henry's idea?
“That was completely Henry. The problem with Coraline as a novel – when you are adapting it dramatically – is nobody talks to her."
Except the cat.
“Except the cat, but the cat only wants to in the other world. Even then, the conversations with the cat in my version are much more frustrating. Everyone around Coraline – with the exception occasionally of her parents – is rather busy and don't pay her as much attention as they could. They never quite listen to what she says, they never reply to what she actually says . . . and they get her name wrong.
“So Henry thought: 'Let’s give her somebody she can have a conversation with as an equal' and that meant Wigbie.
"The alternatives were that Coraline is either talking to the 4th Wall or she’s narrating the story. Given the choice between those 3 options, I can see why Henry went the way that he went.”
I noticed that some of the creepiness in the novel was toned down for the movie. In the book, her Other Father was this sluglike monster who tries to eat her –
“I think that goes back to when I originally gave it to Henry. When he had read the book, that chapter had not yet been written. I handed the first draft in to my editor and she said, ‘What happens to the Other Father?’ and I said, ‘You don’t want me to write that; it’s too scary.’ And she said, ‘No, write it.’ So I wrote that chapter.
“By then, Henry had already assimilated a manuscript without that chapter and he had his own vision, that the Other Father turned into this pumpkin creature.
Another message that I noticed in Coraline was this idea of ‘Be grateful for what you have.’ Do you feel that message is really important today? Are you glad that it’s part of the fabric of the story?
“I am, but much more importantly, I wanted to say: ‘People who love may not pay you all the attention you would like, and people who give you all the attention you would like may not have your best interests at heart.’ I think that, as a message for anybody, is a useful one. “
Another thing I noticed was that I heard about the difficulty in getting the CGI and the stop-motion working together –
“There was no CGI.”
That’s what I wanted to ask you, because I had never heard that there was CGI in the movie –
“Right. Four years ago, when they were looking at ways to do Coraline, one of the ways that was talked about was ‘do half of the film in stop-motion, and when Coraline enters the other world, go CGI.’ This was immediately abandoned as a bad plan but every now and then somebody who has not done their homework . . . it’s Wiki-true. It’s that wonderful sort of Wiki-truthfulness where somebody writes something online, and somebody else embroiders on it and then it never goes away.
“CGI was used in the same way that hand-painting is used in traditional stop-motion: to paint out armatures and to paint out cracks. There’s a thin line on Coraline’s face where they take off the lower face plate and replace it, and they painted out those two cracks in post-production. It’s the same thing people would do painstakingly with a paintbrush, except they’re doing it painstakingly on a computer.”
"I think there was one CGI star-field where the ghost-children appear, and now they have their eyes and they’re gold. And they CGI'ed the star-field because, however much they tried, they couldn’t get the hand-painted one to work.
“But everything else is hand-painted, even the scene where Coraline is in the car with her mum, and they’re driving along, that’s a hand-painted background."
How do you feel when you see the creations of your mind brought to life in a different medium?
“I like it, but the book is the book. I love that there are three, coming up on 4, puppet-theatre versions of Coraline. There have been several live-action plays, there’s the movie and now there’s an off-Broadway musical, with music by (Magnetic Fields mastermind) Stephen Merritt . . . and I love all of these. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all these wonderful spin-offs from the book. I get a tremendous amount of joy seeing the Coraline movie and the work that Henry and 400 other people – toiling for 4 years – have created. It’s thrilling, and magnificent and wonderful.
“The next thing I’m really looking forward to is going to the off-Broadway premiere and seeing what Stephen and his group have done. I know that they’ve done a much more literal beat-for-beat adaptation of the book, but in casting . . . they have Coraline played by a 50-year-old lady, they have a man in drag doing the Other Mother, they’ve got this colour-blind, race and age casting going on.
"It’s either going to be completely bizarre or completely awesome, and I cannot wait to find out which one it is.”
(In Part #3 of this interview, Neil Gaiman talks about surviving – and thriving – as a writer in Hollywood)
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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