If you’ve been watching our videos, you know
that we cover a wide bunch of animated shows and movies, but they’re usually on the lighter
side concerning characters and story. Well, we wanted to change things up a little
considering that Halloween was just around the corner and we didn’t want
to miss out on the fun. With that said, you better not be watching this alone in pitch
black darkness, and in case you get spooked, you can’t say we didn’t warn you. And for those
of you who love horror, you’re gonna love this one. I’m Keegan with Channel Frederator
and these are 107 facts about Coraline. The movie is based on Neil Gaiman's novel of
the same name, which tells the story of titular character Coraline discovering a parallel world to
hers behind a secret door in her new home with a dark sinister secret, because this isn't Narnia
where everything looks like it came straight from a fantastical dream and every animal talks,
though you might argue there are some overlaps but we will let you be the judge of that.
The movie started to take on shape when its director, Henry Selick, met Neil Gaiman shortly
after he had finished writing the book and was invited by Selick to adapt it into a film.
Gaiman was a fan of Selick's work, who had a history of directing stop-motion
movies, like The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Monkeybone.
And that already tells you that this is a stop-motion feature, and the first project
of this kind that has been produced by the stop-motion animation studio LAIKA,
which would go on to produce a bunch of other stop-motion films like ParaNorman, The
Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and more. The movie's director, Henry Selick, joined
Laika as supervising director, back when the studio was under its original name, Will
Vinton Studios (when it was still struggling). Because of this, the studio was forced to
lay off several members of the crew and things weren't looking good. Until Coraline.
The movie ended up being a major success, receiving many award nominations and winning
three Annie Awards for Best Music in an Animated Feature, and Best Character Design
and Production Design in a Feature Production. Despite that, Selick left the studio
in 2009, the year the movie came out, due to an unsuccessful contract renegotiation,
but Coraline's success story inspired the studio to shift gears to hone in more on stop-motion
animation projects, resulting in more lay-offs in its computer animation department.
The movie's score was composed by French composer Bruno Coulais and marks his first
score for an animated feature. He'd later go on to compose music for more animated
projects, including Apple TV+'s Wolfwalkers. While writing, Neil Gaiman was typing the name
"Caroline" and along the way accidentally mistyped it as "Coraline”. This mistake eventually inspired
the author into writing the novel Coraline. Throughout the film, the neighbors call Coraline
"Caroline", much to her annoyance. By the end of the film, everyone gets her name right,
possibly an allusion to the previous fact. As is common for any film adaptation, the
film expands on the contents of the novel and introduces the character Wyborn Wybie Lovat,
who does not appear in the novel. He was created so Coraline would not have to talk to herself
and so she would have a friend her own age. However in the novel, Coraline is told
about a family that used to live in the apartment complex she and her parents
live in. That family's name was Lovat. Initially the film was going to be live action,
and Dakota Fanning was actually going to physically portray Coraline. When it was decided
instead to make a stop-motion animated film, Fanning was asked if she would still be interested
in providing Coraline's voice. She said yes, as she thought it would be fun to do,
and grew even more excited when she saw what Coraline was going to look like.
There are many key differences between Neil Gaiman's book and the movie. Most significantly,
in the book, Coraline was much more suspicious and intelligent and she could only go back and
forth between the two worlds via the special door. In the movie, she is also shown to just wake up
back at her real home without entering the door. Coraline’s parents had no names in the
novel, whereas in the movie they were given the names "Charlie" and "Mel".
Coraline was the first stop-motion animated feature to be shot entirely in 3D.
To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from
two slightly apart camera positions. With Coraline, LAIKA has become the first company
to do a feature-length movie using replacement faces printed on a 3D printer. Instead of ink
on paper, 3D printing uses a UV-sensitive resin and support material that is sprayed down in a
layering process that builds objects in 3D space. A total of 15,000 replacement faces were created
for all the characters in the film, each one of which had to be hand-sanded and hand-painted.
Coraline alone had over 6,300 face replacements. The film required more than 70 character
fabricators, puppet wranglers, armaturists, mold makers, character painters, costume designers
and fabricators, and hair and wig fabricators. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.
There were 28 identical puppets of Coraline used in the making of the movie; each one took
10 individuals 3-4 months to construct. The main Coraline puppet stood 9.3 to 9.4 inches tall.
The number of animators involved would peak between 30-35 animators, and an additional
250 technicians and (digital) designers, with an overall cooperation of up to
450 people working on the project. During production, Laika Studios had students
from The Art Institute of Portland help with the film in terms of sets and designs, which
makes sense, because if you’re going to make a movie of this scale, you’re gonna need all the
help you can get. And since this is stop-motion, you will need an even bigger team
than for your usual animation feature. On average, each animator completed anywhere
from 2.22 to 6.52 seconds of footage per week. This translates to 90–100 seconds
of overall finished animation each week. Which is not a lot, considering the movie having a
runtime of 100 minutes. Selick, who also wrote the script for the movie, initially told Gaiman
that he estimated a 47-minute long movie. The Jumping Mouse Circus sequence had as many as
51 carefully choreographed mice on screen at once, each needing to be replaced with a slightly
different mouse 12 times for every second of film. In the end, over 650 different
mice -- or 6,000 separate parts -- were created ranging in scales from 100% to 222%.
Completing the film involved over 500 people over four years, with two years of pre-production.
Principal photography alone took 18 months. Stop-motion not only takes a long, long time,
as we’ve established, and an absurd amount of patience, but also lots of space. The movie
was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m2) warehouse in Oregon, with the stage divided into
50 units that were separated by black curtains. Each unit contained a different set that was in
the process of being dressed, lit, rigged or shot, amounting to nearly 150 slots for staging. Among
the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot apple orchard, and a model of
Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Though not mentioned by name, the setting of the film is Ashland, Oregon, which is the state where
Laika Entertainment is based. The stage performers and performances in the movie are references to
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival held in Ashland. The Pink Palace's address bears
the same numbers as the nondescript warehouse where the film was produced.
Raking in over $124 million in theaters worldwide, Coraline is the third-highest-grossing
stop-motion film of all time after Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
A month before its release in February 2009, a video game based on the movie was released by
D3 Publisher and developer Papaya Studio. The game features characters' voice lines, but only three
of the actors from the movie reprised their roles: Dakota Fanning as Coraline, Keith David as the
Cat and Robert Bailey Jr. as Wyborn "Wybie" Lovat. Neil Gaiman has said that out of all the
film and television adaptations of his books, Coraline is his favorite.
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. Small garments like Coraline's gloves took anywhere from six weeks to six months
from conceptual design to finished product. The art direction of the movie was inspired by
the works of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi, whom Selick invited on board to become
the movie's concept artist. Uesugi was initially hired for brief character work over
a few weeks and eventually got a bigger role, working on the movie for over a year, and being
a big influence on the movie's contrasting color palette, which is muted in Coraline's
real world and colorful in The Other World. The Other Father has two different voice
actors: John Hodgman provides his regular speaking voice, whereas John Linnell
is the one that can be heard singing. Linnell is part of the American alternative
rock band They Might Be Giants, which is made up of him and bandmate John Flansburgh. The two
provided the music for The Other Father Song, which was one of the two out of the ten
that they had written that was not cut. The second song by the band can be
heard in the movie's end credits. The Other Mother is always humming one
of the soundtrack songs while she cooks, among them the song Dreaming, which
is the opening theme of the movie. The choral pieces in the movie were sung by a
children's choir in a nonsense language. The main soloist is coincidentally called Coraline.
As with any movie, you can’t prevent scenes ending up on the cutting room floor. Among the
deleted scenes was a scene in which Wybie tells Coraline that his grandmother is black, with
the Sweet Ghost Girl being his great aunt and Grandma Lovat's missing sister. There also was an
altered version of the Octopus Facehugger scene, in which Coraline’s dad Charlie
breaks wind after eating pizza, which was later changed into belching instead.
The latter of the two cut scenes actually remained in the movie, sort of. When Coraline's parents are
tucking her into bed around the end of the movie, you can see a pizza stain on Charlie’s shirt,
likely a leftover from the deleted scene. This mistake was probably kept in because fixing it
might have meant more effort than it was worth, especially in a stop-motion feature.
Even 12 years after its release, there's still new people discovering the movie for
the first time with existing demand: American home video and music company, Shout! Factory released
a new Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2021. Coraline has also been made into a stage
musical, produced by MCC Theater in New York, with music and lyrics by Stephin
Merritt of the band The Magnetic Fields. The movie has its own website which comes
with an interactive exploration game where the player can scroll through Coraline's
world; in 2009 it won the Webby Award for "Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics".
The leaves in the scene where Coraline is returning to the well were created by spraying
popcorn pink and cutting it up into little pieces. Mr. Bobinsky is wearing the Russian Hero Medal for
Service at the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster on April 26, 1986. The front reads "Participant in
the clean-up campaign" and "4A3C" indicates "Chernobilskaya Nuclear Power Plant." This medal
is unique as it is the only medal in the world awarded for participation in a nuclear clean up.
It's a popular theory that Mr. Bobinsky's skin color is the result of exposure to
the radioactivity but according to the film's creators, his skin is blue from
being outside in the cold all the time. In the initial recording session, Dawn French
played the role of Miss Spink and Jennifer Saunders played Miss Forcible. However, director
Henry Selick wasn't satisfied with the result, so he had French and Saunders switch roles
and re-record their parts. These second recordings were used in the film, which
might explain why the characters resemble the actress who did NOT provide the voice.
The two members of the 'Ranft Bros. Moving Company' that moves Coraline's family into
their home are named for brothers Jerome Ranft and Joe Ranft. Both brothers did work on
Nightmare Before Christmas with Director Henry Selick and also worked for Pixar Animation
Studios. The mover at the front door (who is given the $1.00 tip) is modeled after Joe Ranft.
Near the end of the film, Coraline's father is seen reenacting the famous face-hugger scene
from Alien, using Coraline's stuffed squid. The model of the Father was based
on Ted Raimi, brother of director and filmmaker Sam Raimi who is best known for
his Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire. When the Other Father is sadly playing
one key on the piano, the sound is F#, when the key he's pressing on is actually F.
The painting in the living room that Coraline calls "boring" and that changes from the real
world to the "other" world, resembles the work of artist Mark Ryden, who is known for
bizarre imagery usually involving children. The design of Coraline's ceiling as
she dreams of the Ghost Children is reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night".
The "Detroit Zoo" snow globe featured in the film contains a model of The Horace Rackham Memorial
Fountain, or the "Bear Fountain," sculpted by Corrado Parducci in 1939 as the centerpiece
of the Detroit Zoo's reflecting pool. Certain elements in the movie were made
to look handcrafted: the flames were done with traditional animation and painted
digitally, and the fog was dry ice. The snow was made from superglue and baking soda.
1,300 square feet of fake fur was applied to stand in for live and dead grass.
Despite all the detail work, mistakes still happen. One such mistake occurs in the
scene right before Coraline discovers the door: she drops her notebook, and in one frame
you can see the wires holding it up. When the Other World begins to disintegrate,
in the beginning the metal stairs leading up to the attic apartment of the Other Bobinsky
are missing but they reappear shortly after. The Fantastical Garden was the most
complex set created for the film, featuring hundreds of handcrafted flowers, most
of which had their own individual light sources. All of the prominent plants seen in the Other
Mother's beautiful garden are the same as the seed packets Coraline had aligned on the real
world windowsill near the beginning of the film, in the scene where she tells her
real mother that she "wants things growing" when her friends come to visit.
The family photo of Coraline and her parents shows her hair with brown rather than her
usual blue, implying that Coraline has dyed her hair before moving to the Pink Palace.
The Coraline puppet used for filming had 42 different wigs. Her hair was a special blend
of three colors and was made of everyday hair products that included Got2Be Glued Hair
Cement and Garnier Fructis Texture Paste. On the back of the moving van there is graffiti
on the bottom right corner that reads "StopMo Rulz." StopMo is short for Stop-Motion.
The source novel is set in Neil Gaiman's native home England. Although the film was
altered to take place in the United States, voice actors Dawn French, Jennifer
Saunders, and Ian McShane are all English. The original sweater the design team had designed
for Coraline's father sported a big maize-and-blue University of Michigan logo. However producer
Bill Mechanic decided to change the design in favor of his alma mater, Michigan State.
The red lighthouse in one of the snow globes that Coraline places on the shelf was
modeled after Big Red, the lighthouse at the Holland State Park in Holland, Michigan.
When Coraline sees her friends in her photo from Michigan, she exclaims: "My best Trolls!"
The word "troll" is a common Michigan nickname for someone who lives in the lower peninsula.
Coraline is left handed, as shown when she is writing down random things
while exploring the house. In a deleted portion of the table scene
where Coraline's (real) father sings to her, he laments, "I think I have a virus."
Coraline's father is voiced by John Hodgman, perhaps more famously known as "PC" in
Apple's "I'm a Mac" advertisements, where he often complains of being susceptible to viruses.
At different points in the film, Coraline is seen wearing a black Baker Boy hat with a symbol of
a Lotus flower on the front. In Greek mythology, the Lotus eaters were a group of people that lived
on an island dominated by a Lotus tree. When the inhabitants ate the Lotuses, they would completely
forget their home and loved ones, and want only to stay with their fellow Lotus eaters – a theme
that runs throughout the course of the movie. Coraline is seen using a Leica
M3 camera, the name of which is based on the movie’s animation studio Laika.
Coraline's parents drive a Volkswagen Beetle. The Laika studio, where they produced and filmed the
movie, is located directly across the street from the Beaverton, Oregon Volkswagen corporate office.
The car model is also a nod to insects, many examples of which are seen throughout the
film. The wallpaper in the living room of the Pink Palace is covered in beetle shapes that
blend into the otherwise-subtle floral design. During the meal with the Other Mother, the
"Welcome Home" cake features a double loop on the O in "home", but not in "welcome".
According to Graphology, a double loop on a lower case O means that the person who wrote
it is lying. There is only one double loop, meaning she is welcome, but she is not home,
thus implying the Other Mother is lying. The Other Mother's name "Beldam" is
an archaic word meaning “malicious and ugly woman”, which perfectly describes
the Other Mother. In many stories, a Beldam closely resembles a spider and lures
children into her home with candy and treats, only to trap them inside a cobweb and liquefy
their innards with venom. In other variations, Beldam just traps kids in her home and eats
them, which can be found in the movie’s plot. Just because you’re adapting a children’s
book into film doesn’t mean you can borrow from other books, after all.
Towards the end of the movie, Coraline's real mother puts away a toy tank.
The tank closely resembles the first ever tank, the British Mark I, nicknamed "Mother".
During the first scene set in Coraline's bedroom, you can see that the photo frame containing the
photo of her friends from back home is set on a stand in the shape of a Praying Mantis. This
links to the Praying Mantis tractor that the 'Other' Father drives later on in the film.
Despite being Russian, the flag hanging outside Mr. Bobinsky's apartment
resembles the Montenegro flag. Partway through the credits, behind the scenes
footage of the mice swirling around the portal is shown, giving a look at the process
of animating in front of the blue screen. At the very end of the credits, the words "For
those in the know: jerk wad" appear on the screen. This is a clue that could be used on the Coraline
website in order to get an entry in a contest that ran during the movie's US theatrical run.
As Coraline explores the house, the "shower scene" from the movie Psycho is referenced as she pulls
back the shower curtain and stabbing music plays. The back of the chair where Coraline's doll sits
features a small, flower-shaped pattern. This small design is nearly identical to the one on
the back of Jack Torrance's chair in The Shining, seen during one of his "all work
and no play" writing sessions. The movie has a bunch of references linked
to director and writer Henry Selick: The most obvious one is the face on the
dollar bill given to the mover for a tip, showing the face of Henry Selick. Filmmakers
will never run out of ideas to self-insert themselves into their projects…
Coraline's Other Father wears monkey slippers that resemble Monkeybone,
which was directed by Henry Selick. When Coraline returns to the Other World
on the second night, she finds the Other Mother cooking "dinner-breakfast". The Other
Mother cracks an egg, and the yolk is the head of Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before
Christmas, which Henry Sellick also directed. Henry Selick's son, George Selick,
voiced one of the ghost children. His other son Harry stepped in and provided the
voice of Coraline’s friend in Michigan who spoke to her and can be seen in the picture frame.
The black hat that Coraline took from her suitcase and is seen wearing at one point in
the movie is a Japanese school boy hat. The hat was based on a similar looking hat that
director Henry Selick had found for his son, who had no interest in it. And for some reason,
decided to give Coraline the same storyline, but he changed the ending because unlike his son,
Coraline decides to wear the hat. I am sure there are (pseudo-) psychoanalysts out there who will
interpret this as a parental projection, but that would go beyond the scope of this video, but we
found this one so strange that we kept it in. When Miss Spink and Miss Forcible are introduced,
we see framed placards for two shows they were in, the shows’ titles being a play on real existing
plays by Shakespeare. The play "Julius Sees Her" is based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
and the less cleverly spoof of "King Leer" is named after the play King Lear.
But the Shakespeare references won’t just stop there. During a trapeze act in
the 'Other World,' Ms Spink and Ms Forcible quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The
words they speak are part of a speech that Hamlet gives to a pair of courtiers.
The doormat of Ms. Spink's and Ms. Forcible's says "No whistling in the house."
Whistling in a theater is considered bad luck. While Other Ms.Spink is recreating the painting
"Ulysses and the Sirens" by Herbert James Draper, which depicts a scene from the Greek Myth,
Other Ms. Forcible is recreating "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli, which
shows the birth of the Roman goddess Venus. There are 248 Scottie Dogs, or Scottish
Terriers, in the audience with Coraline and Wybie watching the stage performance.
The sweater that the Other Mother makes Coraline is a reference to the story Wibey tells Coraline
about falling into the well and seeing "a sky full of stars in the middle of the day". Coraline is
in a situation that is seemingly plain as day, yet her sweater represents being trapped in a
situation much like being trapped in a well. The strange object that Miss Spink and Miss
Forcible give Coraline on her second visit to their apartment is an adder stone. According
to European mythology, adder stones have magical powers, such as the ability to reveal witch
disguises and traps by looking through the middle of the stone. Coraline does just this in the Other
World to find the ghost children's real eyes. In the lightning strike scene, a lightning bolt
in the shape of Beldam's true hand is visible. A little while later, when Coraline first goes to
the actresses' apartment downstairs, they read her tea leaves and see the hand once again. Miss Spink
states that the hand means 'danger'. Both of these scenes foreshadow the Other Mother’s real nature.
This is also the case when the Other Father is singing his song to Coraline. He is attached
to gloves which control what he does and makes him play the piano, like a puppet. This
mirrors the fact that the Beldam is in control of the Other Father and uses him as a
puppet to lure Coraline into her false world. If you pay attention to the song itself, the
lyrics seem unobtrusive, when in reality, he is warning Coraline about the Other Mother's motive.
At the end of the movie, as the camera zooms out from everyone in the garden, we can see
the landscaping resembling "Other" Mother's true face as opposed to Coraline's
like it was in the "other" world. The three wonders the Other Mother makes for
Coraline are references to the real world, as are what the Other people become when the
Other world starts to fall apart. The Other Father becomes a pumpkin in the garden,
a reference to the real Father's job; the Other Bobinsky simply becomes rats in a costume,
a reference to the real Bobinsky's jumping mice; and the Other Spink and Other Forcible are
represented as candy, a reference to the real Spink and Forcible's taffy collection.
There are various little hints in the movie’s background implying the fate of the missing
children that had once lived in the Pink Palace. Most notably there was the introductory
scene of the doll resembling the ghost girl who was Grandma Lovat's missing sister.
There was also the "painfully boring" portrait Coraline discovers portraying an Edwardian-looking
little boy eating an ice cream cone, resembling one of the other ghosts, and the silhouettes of
the three ghost children are seen on the wall of the dining room in the Other World, as well.
The well that Coraline finds during her exploration of the Pink Palace is located in
what resembles a fairy ring, which is a folkloric symbol indicating the presence of fairies.
Stepping on or trespassing the ring is said to come with bad consequences. Sometimes, they can be
linked with good fortune, such as a person being allowed to interact with and enjoy the company
of fairies for a night. In the film, Coraline experiences both the good and bad consequences
of stepping in the fairy ring. At first, she's allowed to enjoy the pleasures of the Other World,
but soon she's in danger of being trapped there forever unless she fixes both her mistakes and
the mistakes of the children who came before her. There’s only one major scene that occurs
outside of the Pink Palace, which is when Coraline and her mom drop off Charlie and then
proceed to go shopping for school uniforms. Producers originally wanted to get rid
of the scene because they didn’t like how it took them outside of the world that
was created at the Pink Palace. However, director Henry Selick insisted
on keeping the scene as it was. It was important to Selick to keep it
because it’s one of the final moments that Coraline and her mom have with each
other before Coraline’s parents go missing. The scene added a tension that was
needed at that point in the movie, which producers then realized
after seeing the completed product. In 2015, LAIKA held an auction titled “The
Art of Laika” where the studio auctioned off various puppets and other pieces of material,
such as set pieces and props that were used in their movies. The studio sold more than
250 items, generating more than $1 million in sales. Against expectations, the puppet
of the Other Mother was the top seller and went for $50,000 and the puppet of Coraline
in her blue sweater sold for about $24,000. Did you enjoy our list? What fact do you think
we missed? Let us know in the comments below, and while you’re there, like and subscribe to see more great videos every week. And
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