Coraline

Muted colors at home, bright ones behind the little door

Looking for a design unlike that of most animated films, Henry Selick brought in the Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi as concept artist. Uesugi kept the real world in muted colors and made the Other World more colorful, as in The Wizard of Oz. He was hired to design characters for a few weeks and ended up working on the film for more than a year, sets and backgrounds included.

The first feature produced by the American studio Laika was shot in a warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon, and every object on screen was made for it. The crew built 28 identical Coraline puppets, and a knitter, Althea Crome, was hired to make their miniature sweaters, sometimes with needles as thin as a human hair. Bruno Coulais wrote the score, whose choral pieces are sung by the Children's Choir of Nice in an invented language.

The Story

Eleven-year-old Coraline Jones moves with her parents, who are absorbed in their work, into the Pink Palace Apartments, an old Victorian house in Ashland, Oregon. Behind a small door in the living room, she finds a tunnel to an Other World, where doubles of her parents with buttons for eyes lavish her with food and attention. The Other Mother then offers to let her stay forever, on condition that buttons are sewn onto her eyes.

Neil Gaiman invited Selick to adapt his 2002 novella because he admired The Nightmare Before Christmas. Selick felt that a direct adaptation would make "maybe a 47-minute movie", and he added Wybie, the landlady's grandson, so that Coraline would not seem to be talking to herself all the time.

The Ideal Audience

The film is rated PG in the United States, and Common Sense Media recommends it from age 9, warning of a very dark and creepy tone. Roger Ebert called it "nightmare fodder for children, however brave, under a certain age." Released in February 2009 and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the film reached $188.3 million worldwide after its re-releases in 2023 and 2024.