Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments
Coraline
8/19/08 - Henry Selick, director of the upcoming 3-D animated
Coraline, told SCI FI Wire that he is currently finishing
production on the stop-motion movie, which is adapted from Neil
Gaiman's Hugo Award-winning graphic novel of the same name. "We
will complete animation on Coraline in about six weeks and
plan a February release of 2009," Selick said. Dakota Fanning
voices the title character, who steps through a door to discover an
alternate version of her life and a new set of parents. "It's a
dark, perfect, modern fairy tale." Selick said. "It concerns itself
with a primal thought every child considers: I wish I had other
parents. That, and the button eyes." Gaiman and Selick co-wrote the
script for the film and have been working hand-in-hand to translate
the novel faithfully to the screen. "The movie version of
Coraline is very faithful to the tone and the spirit of the
book," Selick said. "In the translation from book to film there are
adjustments to story and character that have to be made. The main
thing I always felt was I could not disappoint the readers of the
book, and though some details have been changed as well as the order
of the sequences, I feel we will be successful." Early production
images from Coraline have surfaced and drawn comparisons to
Selick's beloved work on Nightmare. "There is no doubt that
there are some similarities between the two projects," he admitted.
"I also have many of the original Nightmare team members
working on Coraline. We've all grown, and the visual
aesthetic is ultimately a very different one. You'll see great
animation like Nightmare, like a cousin of Nightmare.
More like a second cousin. The last thing I'd want to do would be to
try to rip off a classic film I directed." One of the major
advances in terms of the animation process is the new stereoscopic
dual digital camera, Selick said. "It just gives you more of what is
there, just a little more sense of the reality of this medium," he
said. "It does not live in the computer, nor is it a series of
drawings; it's an actual real set of puppets." Coraline is
currently set for release in February 2009. --Jeff Otto
7/28/08 - Dakota Fanning, who provides the voice of the lead character in the upcoming animated fantasy film Coraline, said that it's been more than two years since she first started recording her dialogue for the film. The film is currently in production in Portland, Ore., under the direction of Henry Selick. Like his previous film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline features stop-motion animation achieved through the manipulation of three-dimensional puppet models. Dakota said that she's been impressed with the painstaking detail that has gone into the project so far. Coraline is set for release on Feb. 9, 2009.
11/20/07 - Coraline: An Animated Love Story is about a bored girl who finds out that there's a bricked-up door behind a wall in her room. When she travels through the door, she discovers a different set of parents. The film stars the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David and Jennifer Saunders. Coraline may release in 2008.
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