Research & Development for Animation: Coraline Essay

The film I have chosen to research into is the stop-frame animated feature length film known as ‘Coraline’. This breathtaking animation was created by a company known as ‘Laika’ Studios in Oregon, Portland in America back in 2009. Coraline is based on a novel written in 2002 by an English author named ‘Neil Gaiman’ with the novel sharing the same name as the film. Coraline is a horror slash fantasy of weird nature, but has a fantastic and unpredictable story line. The story line of the film features a young girl named Coraline Jones who finds a passage way in her new home that potentially leads to a parallel world, but everything doesn't turn out to be as nice as it seems.

The research that went into the making of this film is phenomenal because of all depth and detail that was put into everything that was made to produce such a beautiful looking film. The pre-production of this film took around a year, where in that time, the company would take part in a process called research and development. During this period of time, this was when all of the designing, building and creating was taking place such as character and set design, story line, story boarding and everything else that had to be considered in the making of the film.

The scenery and sets played a huge part in this film because of all the thought that has gone into creating every last detail and making them look pristine and realistic. It was also because there were fifty seven active sets in total that had to be built, with mostly all of them being roughly life size in scale. The look and style of the sets and props in this film relate closely to the ones used in Tim Burton’s recent film ‘The Corpse Bride’ for instance and it was said that the designs have been influenced from that certain piece.

The ‘Pink Palace Apartments’ house that is the main location of this film is such a great set to look at and you can just imagine the time and effort that went into creating that masterpiece. However, before the house was built, the initial concept design ideas of the house looked a bit different as shown in the pictures below. Visual Designer ‘Tadahiro Uesugi’ says “I drew the designing process upon the story of the Coraline book” but however the designs were altered to see the location set in a more remote place.” I was told which images in the book I was going to translate into the movie; except for that, everything was basically up to me. Henry's only instruction was: "Design with your own ideas; but we would like to see something we've never seen before!".

Tadahiro also mentioned that from his original concept designs of characters and backgrounds, he altered them to match the script he was given and differ from those he had drawn from the novel, “First, I was asked to design characters for the movie based on my reading of the Japanese book, NOT based on the illustrations of the book. Then I started designing the setups and the backgrounds; however, I was given directions and resources for these designs. Soon after, I received the script and started designing according to the descriptions in the script; therefore, if I tell you what I translated from the book, I would say the basic design of the characters (1). This shows the roller coaster of designing, illustrating the amount of thought process behind the final look of the work. It was also said that Disney’s ‘101 Dalmatians’ piece is a key inspiration on Tadahiro’s work.

The director and screen writer of his film; ‘Henry Selick’ mentioned in a video on YouTube video that it took him quite a while to create the perfect look of Coraline stating, “In designing and making Coraline the lead actor, I went through a lot of drawings, sculptures, a lot of versions of her hair, to refine her to become this character than you could bring to life, the main thing was just let her be a meek enough colour, we put a lot of love and care into all the choices of how she looks”(2). This shows that the main character wasn’t just thrown together based on a first idea, it took time to develop and make into this loveable character that we see on screen, one in which can make the audience fall in love with her and make us believe that she is truly alive and not just a puppet.

In this film, the head framework of each puppet was a new technology that had never been done before that consisted of clockwork type machinery where the animators were able to adjust features of the face like the eyes for example, whilst also being able to use hundreds of attachable replacement faces with different expressions and mouth shapes. For each character there would be an entire library of hundreds of different looking faces that would easily fit onto the heads of the puppets. The design behind this method of animating is mind numbing and has to be applauded because of how well it paid off with the end result. There must have been a lot of research into how this technique would work, along with working besides engineers who know the ins and outs of creating metal mechanisms. The size of the puppets ranged from six inches tall to two feet tall, the difference being that sometimes they had to create larger puppets for close up shots.

The armatures are made from metal that work like skeletons which are riddled with tiny joints that are then covered with a form of silicon skin. The skin allows for soft movement, covering the metal joints while retaining poseablilty. Like interchangeable faces, the hands are the same, and a total of over a thousand different pairs of hands were produced for that film alone.

The lead animator, ‘Travis Knight’ said “The puppet has a mind of its own and we love them and we hate them, but we can never predict what they are going to do really”(3). This explains that although the puppets are brilliantly built to do their purpose, they can at times be frustrating

to use.

A model sculpture designer named ‘Damon Bard’ created small scale models of the characters in Coraline and talked about the initial 3D model making; “the original clay sculptures are destroyed in the mould process but the casts of the maquetts are either stored, on display at the studio, or go on tour”. This tells us that his models were the first step in creating the puppets, starting from simple clay models in which were then used as casts.

Clothing for the puppets was a tedious job during the design process because of wear and tear; some outfits have to be duplicated 30 times with the exact same detailing. A woman named ‘Althea Chrome’ with the role of miniature knitter, created lots of different miniature clothing for the characters in Coraline, where each outfit can take from six weeks to six months to knit, scaling in size to be as small as an inch big.

In an interview with a costume designer called ‘Deborah Cook’, she spoke of how the company went about designing the costumes based on the 2002 novel: “the story was set in contemporary America so we looked at a lot of contemporary clothing and personality types and what they might wear as well as the original character drawings”. She also mentioned that the director led the way of the costume designs “His [Selick's] ideas for Coraline’s characters led the way for the costume design”.

The use of pre-made dolls clothing wasn't even considered for this animated film because of the size of the material in comparison to what size puppets they wanted to use. ‘Deborah Cook’ said “Barbie’s jeans, for example, are more than twice the size of Coraline’s” (4).