Coraline (animation)/Trivia

• Media Research Failure: "Tim Burton's Coraline", now Neil Gaiman has his say about that lack of research.
• Defictionalization: The Detroit Zoo snowglobe.
• Development Hell: More like production hell. It's a stop-motion movie after all.
  • Several times during the production, Henry Selick told Dakota Fanning to raise the tone of her voice, most likely because the production started when she was 9 and ended when she's 14.
• Doing It for the Art: The production speed is about 3 seconds per day.
  • They made about 20 puppets for every character, each one of them taking months to make. And they replace the mouths between shots.
  • The garden scene, the mice circus, the theater, the Other Mother transforming and the other world disintegrating... they're not CGI. They're done with stop-motion. The mice are animated by replacement parts- every single movement needs an entirely new, sculpted mouse figure!
  • The characters' hairs have to be "injected" one by one.
  • The costumes are made by an impossibly patient lady with needles as small as human hairs. That lady's name is Althea Crome, and her part in the making of the film is detailed in this video.
• Fake Nationality: Ian Mcshane as Mr Bobinsky - Bobinsky is Russian while Mcshane is British.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Keith David as a black cat who seems incredibly Badass just because it's his voice. Admittedly, he was pretty badass in the book, too. Luckily, his fight with that one rat doesn't take five minutes of screen time.
  • Keith David voiced Spawn in Todd McFarlane's Spawn, which is based on the comic book of the same name that Neil Gaiman wrote an issue and filed a lawsuit over.
  • Also Teri Hatcher (Susan on Desperate Housewives) as the two mothers.
    • However, in the video game, she's Kath Soucie.
  • The Other Father is briefly voiced by John Linnell of They Might Be Giants during his song for Coraline.
    • One wonders about the content of Mr. Jones' seed catalog. Is it full of made-up seeds, a list of 700 famous gardeners, and masturbation jokes, by any chance?
    • At one point, the father mentions that he is getting a virus. Get it, because he's a PC?
  • And Dakota Fanning as the voice of Coraline.
• Network to the Rescue: Initially, no studio showed interest in the film. Then producer Bill Mechanic (who also believed in James Cameron and Titanic at Fox) showed interest and jumped on as a financier, which got the film made and a distributor in Universal. The movie became a Sleeper Hit, director Henry Selick got a deal at Pixar and the animation studio now works full-time with Universal.
• Non-Singing Voice: The Other Father is voiced by John Linnell for about 30 seconds in a frustratingly catchy song. For the rest of the time, he's John Hodgman.
• The Red Stapler: The Detroit Zoo fountain snowglobe was eventually produced as an actual zoo souvenir after the film was released.
• Sleeper Hit: When the film came out, stop-motion animation was considered dead and the film was expected to die a quick death at the box office against Pink Panther 2 and the My Bloody Valentine remake. After a better than expected opening, the film kept on going until finally becoming the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all-time.
• Star-Making Role: For Laika Animation themselves, whose success with the film lead to closing their CG Features division in favor of a stop motion division.
• Throw It In: The scene with Other Spink and Other Forcible was originally meant to have a song written by They Might Be Giants (as was a lot of the rest of the film, but that's another matter). After hearing the placeholder song the writers had come up with, John and John said it was good enough and there was no reason to replace it.
• What Could Have Been: The movie was originally planned as a musical with 10 songs written by They Might Be Giants, but this idea was discarded in favor of a more conventional movie, although one of their songs (the Other Father's number) does remain in the film, and the band has said they will release the other songs written for the movie on other projects ("Careful What You Pack", for example, wound up on their 2007 album The Else).
  • The film at one point had plans to use CGI for the Other World segments, and Normal Claymation for the Real World segments.
• There was a lot of discussion about the famous Other Spink and Other Forcible performance, specifically exactly how much they could get away with. Selick said he convinced the company to let it slide because Other Forcible was not only covering her naughty bits, but was also spoofing a socially acceptable, famous painting.
• Author Neil Gaiman has discussed the adaptation with director Henry Selick since before the book was published. He and his daughter Maddy Gaiman are fans of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• The movie's production took five years, at the rate of roughly three seconds a day.
• It is the first stop-motion movie to be produced in 3D. As the side-by-side camera rig commonly used in live-action shoots cannot fit into the miniature sets, not to mention unable to create the desired results, the camera crew solved this by building a camera rig that slightly move the camera sideways after each take and take a second picture, resulting in the 3D effect seen in the movie.
• Most of the non-stop-motion effects are either hand-drawn or shot in live action, with as few CG effects as possible.
• The character Wybie Lovat was not in the original book, and was added following producer Bill Mechanic's suggestion. The decision is approved by Neil Gaiman.
• Has the world record for longest Stop Motion film.