Down the Rabbit Hole

Love this picture!

A storage shelf for characters -- currently holding Coraline's Mummy and Daddy? © David Strick

It's from the set of a movie, Coraline to be released early next year. More pictures from the set are at the LA Times website. Coraline is based on a book by famed graphic novelist, Neil Gaiman, with the title character voiced in the movie by Dakota Fanning.

It seems,

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.

Phil Knight of Nike fame is getting into movies, huh! Maybe the tag-line goes from "Just Do It" to "Just See it"? (Sorry... that was bad!)

Btw, if you haven't read Gaiman's work (I haven't), please don't rush to see the movie with your kids. Its not a childrens movie.

Rather, it's a spooky, through-the-looking-glass tale of a lonely tweener girl who moves to Ashland and steps into a mirror world where sinister impostors stand in for her parents.

...

There's something really raw about the film, too.

Laika has toned down some of the book's scarier episodes for film, but a 20-minute preview still provided plenty of creepy moments. The spunky Coraline crawls through a womblike space to reach the home of her "other parents"; the scenery outside the house is gray, foggy and foreboding; and the "other mother," with buttons for eyes, starts to show some less-than-maternal qualities.

I'll leave you with a recent interview with Gaiman.