I was recently invited to go and see half an hour of finished footage for the upcoming release of Henry Selick’s movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Apparently, the entire film is only about three weeks away from being finished now. It is then scheduled to be released on Friday, February 6th. The footage I saw was in 3D, as the whole film will be. The effect is pervasive, but not gimmicky. The last 3D film I saw was U23D and a lot of the effects in that consisted of Bono head-butting towards the camera and the Edge swinging his guitar out towards us. That was fun. It was the band playing with a new toy, but what’s being done here is very different. It isn’t shown in 3D so that we can have the big gimmicky “reaching out towards us” moments, but more to give another level of reality to the world that we’re looking in at. I found myself expecting to be able to look above the screen or to the sides of it and see the rest of the world.

I have fond memories of visiting the costuming department in Portland as they were making the film, and listening to Georgina Hayns and Deborah Cook explain to us the care and hard-work which was put into every piece of clothing. This is when I got to see how well it paid off. The fabrics really do pop. They really do look tactile. There is weight to them, and often on them. There’s a great visual wrestling match going on in the movie between what looks real and what looks animated. I think that there always is in good animation, but the borders are drawn in different places in this work than they usually are. It gives a new experience. I also really enjoyed some of the effects they managed to get with smoke and fog over the landscape.

Even in the limited footage which we saw, I got a strong thematic impression. We are assaulted first by scene after scene of silliness and happiness; cannons shooting cotton-candy, cute bouncing kangaroo-mice, etc. And then the story takes an unexpected turn towards the darkness. The other foot drops. The taste sours in our mouth as we discover the price expected for all of this fun: what Coraline is expected to do in order to be allowed to stay in this fun ‘Other World.’ The brights are very bright. The happiness is very silly, but the darks are black, and there is horror hiding amidst the playfulness. I laughed, and then I worried for our Coraline. Even knowing the story, I was unprepared for actually experiencing this turn with her.

It’s a great combination which really involves the viewer. The light and dark strengthen one another by contrasting so vibrantly.

Teri Hatcher really stands out as doing excellent vocal work as the “Other Mother” in the scenes that I saw. Dakota Fanning also was excellent as Coraline, but this was initially less obvious to me because I didn’t hear Dakota Fanning. To me, it was just Coraline.

After the screening there was a small reception where we were given the opportunity to talk to the people involved with the movie one-on-one in a very informal setting. I spoke first to Travis Knight, the Lead Animator.

He sees the work that they’re doing as having much more in common with the old Disney movies, where delight and grim horror walk hand in hand and make each other more clear, than with what’s going on in the industry currently. Coraline has more in common with Pinocchio or Snow White than Madagascar. And he really believes that the world they’re doing is going to result in the best stop-motion animated movie to date. This wasn’t him bragging or trying to talk himself up. He talked about Coraline as a fan would, even as involved in it as he obviously was.

I then found myself face to face with Henry Selick. I introduced myself again, made sure that he remembered me from the set visit up in Portland. I made a few comments about how exciting and involving I thought the footage that we were shown was, even than what we’d seen months previous up in Portland, and then I asked him the big question; “Are you going to do The Graveyard Book?”

This was the one question which I’d been dying for weeks now to ask Henry Selick. The book only came out very recently, and all the way through, as I read it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been written, almost to order, to be the follow-up to the work that Henry Selick is just now completing. I actually had a theory that watching the footage from Coraline had influenced what Gaiman was doing. A couple of weeks ago I was at a reading which Gaiman gave in Santa Monica for The Graveyard Book. I listened to him read the first half of chapter seven. When he was done with the reading he showed us several minutes of footage from Coraline which Selick had given him. Perhaps this is where I got the idea? That’s not unlikely, but more than that; I can’t at this point imagine a movie being made about a graveyard full of friendly monsters and not think just a little bit about Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas…

I didn’t expect him to be so frank and open in his answer. It seems clear that he would very much like to direct the adaptation of Gaiman’s latest book as well. And he thinks that the best way to adapt the book would be with the stop-motion animation which they used to create Coraline. Apparently Sony has the rights currently and they are thinking about making a live-action adaptation of the book. It isn’t up to Selick at this point, but he points out that the story can be a lot darker when animated than it can be live-action. Certain things would come across as too gruesome or too real live-action. I pointed out that a live-action Jack Skellington might have come across as worse than Freddy Krueger, which got Selick laughing. He then one-upped me by pointing out that the scene in Nightmare Before Christmas where the mad scientist opens up his head and scratches his brain would be far too horrible if it had been performed by a real person!

In fact, Selck suggested, with an eager smile on his face, that I should tell Gaiman that his book would make a much-better movie if he has Selick direct it stop-motion than it would be otherwise. Well, Neil? Are you reading this? I don’t seem to actually have your phone number handy, or else I’d ring you up, so I’m just going to hope that your internet and my internet are the same internet! Let Selick direct The Graveyard Book! I think I’ll make a point in my dreams tonight to see if I can ask the Sandman to help me get a message to his father: “Neil! Let Henry have The Graveyard Book next!”

I have no doubt whatsoever that, after seeing the footage that I’ve seen, Neil will agree that these are the best hands to put that project in as well…