By John Horn Reporting from Hillsboro, Ore. >>>|February 05, 2009
Inside most animated movie studios, the workplace background noise is little more than gentle mouse clicks and the dull drone of computers. The sounds within Laika, the maker of the new stop-motion animated film "Coraline," are often distinctly different: the buzz of electric drills, the whir from sewing machines and the occasional wallop of a hammer.
Animation has grown into not only a billion-dollar business but also a high-tech hotbed of visual effects. But Henry Selick, the writer and director of Laika's "Coraline," wants to make movies the old-fashioned way: with hands, not computer workstations.
"I still think it's viable," Selick said more than two years ago, just as production on "Coraline" was set to begin in a converted yet poorly heated warehouse just outside Portland. Selick, Laika (the new animation studio founded by Nike's Phil Knight) and Focus Features, the film's distributor, are about to find out how viable the film truly is: "Coraline," a visually stunning look at a young girl's imaginary world, opens Friday and will have just three weeks to prove itself because it will lose its 3-D theaters to "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience."
Although Disney is working on the two-dimensional animated film "The Princess and the Frog" and the Sundance Film Festival's opening night film was the stop-motion "Mary and Max," animated movies made without the constant assistance of rendering mainframes are becoming an endangered species.
Two years ago, DreamWorks Animation severed its relationship with Britain's "Chicken Run" studio Aardman Animations, one of the most accomplished purveyors of stop-motion animation, in which painstakingly minute adjustments are made to small, three-dimensional characters who inhabit real environments; because each movement is recorded on just a few frames of film, the characters move fluidly when the movie is completed.
Aardman (like modern stop-motion legend Will Vinton of California Raisins fame) usually employs clay rather than Selick's choice of movable metal-and-silicone-and-fabric puppets that populated his previous films, "Monkeybone," "James and the Giant Peach" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
In some ways, "Coraline," adapted by Selick with several new twists from Neil Gaiman's middle-reader novel, evokes 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas": Both films unfold in fantasy worlds that can be as unsettling as they are exotic; the journeys the characters undertake may be utterly fantastic, but they also remain emotionally allegorical -- Aesop's Fables populated with skeletons and talking animals.
