Oregon Live looks at the ongoing work on Henry Selick’s stop motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s CORALINE, the debut film from a new animation studio:
Behind the anonymous walls of a Hillsboro warehouse, dozens of filmmakers labor quietly on the offbeat project that will turn sneaker mogul Phil Knight into a moviemaker.
Animators hunch over tiny dolls on dimly lit sets, manipulating figures frame-by-frame for the camera. A full day’s work produces no more than a few seconds of footage.
More than 300 crew members have worked on the film since March of last year, crafting a movie called “Coraline” in painstaking “stop-motion.” This debut film will set the tone for Knight’s studio, Laika Entertainment.
Much more in this very detailed progress report.
It sounds like what they are doing is nothing short of fantastic!
Great article. I love pictures of people standing ON stop motion sets and working the models. It has an odd and otherworldly look to it, as though you could step into one of those worlds yourself and walk around. After growing up with Rankin/Bass holiday specials and the like, that would be a very exciting prospect.
first time hearing about this. I will eat anything by Neil Gaiman
I seriously can’t wait for this. That story is first-class creepy, and I think this was a brilliant way to go about adapting it. Plus TMBG wrote a bunch of music for it, so it’s a perfect storm of awesome weird.
Henry Selick fan in the house! I have been a fan of his work since “Slow Bob” in the late 80’s. “Bob” resonated for me because I had a dream just like it when I was a kid.
“‘Whatever life you see on screen, it’s life that’s been sucked out of someone,” Travis Knight says. “There’s something really raw about it.'”
This is also true of fiction and comics. Brilliant.