A very scary fairy tale

Neil Gaiman’s fantastic tale for young readers,
Coraline, almost didn’t see print. But now it’s
a stunning stop-motion movie—in 3D!

MONSTER MOM: From Coraline

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A lonely, bored yet plucky young girl, a dusty old house, a door to nowhere in a forgotten corner of an unused room—the perfect set-up for a fantastic fable for young readers, no? Especially in the able hands of English writer Neil Gaiman.

The award-winning scribe—who will be the Author Guest of Honour at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, here in Montreal in early August—is most notable for scripting Sandman for Vertigo Comics and for novels like American Gods and Anansi Boys. He’s also scripted the BBC TV series Neverwhere, the feature film MirrorMask with his frequent collaborator, artist Dave McKean, and the screen adaptation of his own novel, Stardust. In short, he’s a leading light in the field of fantastic fiction.

Initially, though, publishers ran screaming from Gaiman’s manuscript. It took years for Gaiman’s yarn to see print, but once it did, it promptly hit bestseller lists, was translated into 30 languages and has since been adapted as a graphic novel, an Irish puppet show and a Finnish youth troupe’s stage play. Next up is a stage musical scored by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, but right now, Coraline shines as an astoundingly crafted feature film—in rich, reach-out-and-grab-it 3D, no less!—care of Henry Selick, a modern master of stop-motion animation. Certain alterations in flow and characters have occurred, for practical reasons, but Selick has succeeded in capturing the spirit of Gaiman’s story.

Gaiman, still chuffed from last week’s win of the coveted Newbery Medal—the brass ring for kid-lit creators—for The Graveyard Book, took a few moments to tell the Mirror what Coraline has come to and where it’s coming from.

Mirror: The genesis of Coraline was a bedtime story for your daughters—

Neil Gaiman: It wasn’t a bedtime story, because that would imply that it was the kind of thing where you’re telling it to them at night before they go to sleep, making it up as you go along. It was never made up as I went along. It was always a literary creation.

Holly used to come home from kindergarten and tell me stories, which she would climb up on my lap and dictate, and I would have to write down. And they would be these nightmarish things, absolutely monstrous, terrible—you know, small girls would come home and witches would be impersonating their mothers, and would then lock them up and stuff. I remember thinking at the time that if this was the kind of thing that she liked, I should write her one. Because I couldn’t find anything like that on the shelves—it’s not everybody that has a small Wednesday Addams for a daughter, but I did and I rather enjoyed it.

That was honestly where it began. I went away and just started writing it, because I’m a writer. I wrote 10,000 words, was told it was unpublishable, and it wasn’t until, gosh, about eight years later, 1998, that I sent what I’d written to my then-editor. She read it and said, “This is amazing, what happens next?” I said, “Send me a contract and we shall both find out.” It was not until then that I went back to it and wrote the second two thirds.

M: But you had the girls as a test audience, maybe even in an editorial function?

NG: I don’t know if there was any editorial function but the first thing I did when I finished it was read it to my daughter Maddie. Then I sent it out to about four friends, all of whom had daughters. Dave McKean read it to his daughter Yolanda, which is why he eventually wound up as the illustrator, because she liked it so much. I had a bunch of adults saying, isn’t this scary? And I had a bunch of kids going, this isn’t scary at all, it’s an adventure. It really was the fact that all of these nine-year-old girls were taking it as an exciting adventure that gave me the confidence to say, no, it really is a children’s book, don’t worry.

Dark designs

M: Even before the feature film, Coraline has been adapted as a stage play, a puppet show and a graphic novel. What do you think it is about this story that makes it so well suited to jumping from one medium to another?

NG: I honestly don’t know. I think it’s partly because for whatever reason, there aren’t a lot of stories out there with spunky, smart little girls who don’t have magic powers or anything, who, just using courage and native wit, get to go up against something nasty and win. I think part of it is the imagery of the Other Mother, the button eyes and so forth, which is one of those strange, haunting things that lives in your head. Beyond that, honestly, I don’t know—it’s so strange, this was a book that I was told was unpublishable when I began it.

M: You could have gone for a live-action film, traditional animation, digital animation—but you went specifically for stop-motion animation, specifically with Henry Selick. I think I have an idea why, but maybe you could tell me in your own words.

NG: I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas, it was released in 1993. Despite the title having Tim Burton’s name, I noticed that it was directed by Henry Selick. I went and saw his work on James and the Giant Peach and thought, this is really interesting. When I finished Coraline, one of the first people I sent it to—before it was illustrated, before it got to second draft—was Henry, because I thought, he actually understands that you can go dark in children’s fiction. What is important is not that you’re telling them that there are bogeymen out there, it’s that you’re telling them that bogeymen can be defeated. I felt for the first time that there was someone out there who really understood what kind of thing I was doing.

Magic in motion

NG: I loved the idea of stop-motion for this as well because it allows you both the feeling of absolute reality—everything you see in Coraline, the movie, somebody made, they made it by hand, it exists for real, and that is awesome. It’s real—and yet it isn’t real. I worry that if you did make Coraline as a live-action feature, you’d run the risk of heading over into making something that really would be The Shining for kids.

I don’t know if you’d necessarily make something that would be scary or disturbing for kids, but you’d definitely make something that adults would find deeply, deeply disturbing. Adults are always much more disturbed by Coraline, because I think it’s a different genre of book for them. From a kid’s-eye view, it’s an adventure. It’s about a little girl who goes up against something bad and wins, and they never have any doubt that she’ll get into trouble, and it’s cool, it’s okay, it’s like The Wizard of Oz. Adults, on the other hand, are reading about a child in danger, and a child in danger is a much stranger, more difficult field of literature to cope with, I suspect. Once you’re a parent, reading about a child in danger is really problematic.

M: Back to the stop-motion—there’s some really high-tech gadgetry involved in this production, cutting-edge stuff, but what really engages one is the low-tech stuff, the mundane objects that with a splash of paint and the right lighting are essentially imbued with magic.

NG: I think there is a magic to Coraline that in these days of CGI, we have forgotten. And there’s a magic to the 3D in Coraline. Henry doesn’t use the 3D to throw things at you.

M: I agree, although I’m of two minds, because I do love the lurid old gimmicks of classic 3D, Vincent Price with the paddleball in House of Wax—

NG: He does it five seconds in. You get the needle coming straight at you, and that’s all he ever does, because everything else is about creating your proscenium, about the depth of field, the point where suddenly there are things as real as the old Viewmaster reels, moving about in front of you. The real moments of magic are absolutely low-tech.

CORALINE OPENS THIS FRIDAY, FEB. 6