For two days, on Aug. 14 and 15, Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion film “Coraline” – based on the 2002 book of the same name by Neil Gaiman – returned to theaters in celebration of LAIKA studios’ 15th anniversary and since “Coraline” was the first film that LAIKA ever produced, why not give fans the opportunity to see the iconic film in theaters.
The special showing – put on by Fathom Events, LAIKA and Park Circus – was freshly remastered and recolored and featured additional footage from head costume designer Deborah Cook and senior hair and fur fabricator Jess Lynn as they combed through the LAIKA archives, looking at the miniature costumes and wigs that brought the characters to life.
The art of creating stop-motion animations dates back to the 1890s and is one of the oldest filmmaking techniques that is still used today. With photography as its medium, stop-motion films play a series of photographs in a sequence – 24 photographs per second – to give the appearance of continuous motion.
In recent years, the use of CGI has advanced the filmmaking technique but no matter the advances in technology, stop-motion is an art that will always require the human touch.
According to LAIKA’s website, the film took over 500 people and four years to complete, typically taking ten people about three to four months to construct a single Coraline puppet. In the end, there were 28 identical Coraline puppets, the main one of which stood at about 9-¾ inches tall.
During the bonus footage of the film, Cook said the main goal was to make the film feel as genuine as possible which was done through the creation of hundreds of tiny wigs and garments for each of the characters.
Many stop-motion characters are given one or two outfits that they are seen in throughout the entirety of the film. This is done because creating hundreds of tiny outfits isn’t always the easiest or quickest process. However, Coraline Jones is seen in seven costumes throughout the span of the 1-hour and 40-minute production, which Cook said makes Coraline the stop-motion character with the most costume changes out of all stop-motion films.
In an interview with the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM), Cook said no garments were purchased for the film, everything was entirely handmade to custom-fit each character.
“Not even doll clothes [were used], as they’re actually far too big and wouldn’t fit our characters or have as much attention to detail paid in their making or in their choice or scale of fabric. Barbie’s jeans, for example, are more than twice the size of Coraline’s,” Cook said.
According to LAIKA’s website, Coraline’s gloves were knitted by hand by a miniature knitter, who made six pairs of gloves using needles so small, that they were as fine as a strand of human hair. A single garment of that size took anywhere from six weeks to six months from conceptual design to finished product.
Both the hand-knitted gloves and Coraline’s blue star sweater were lined with latex after being completed to ensure that the duplicates held the same shape, then they were hand sewn onto each puppet, said Cook.
“The most surprising aspect of working in such a small scale is how much detail can actually be achieved once you’ve set out to have no limits in that respect,” Cook said in an interview with FIDM. “The most challenging aspect is finding fabrics in the scale we need and working to deadlines without losing sight of our attention to detail for the costume.”
Cook said that they had to use some unique techniques in order to give the clothes a natural fit on the puppets.
“[The garments are] weighted with very tiny weights to give them a natural sense of gravity and they often have different gauges of wire within their structure too, which connects to the armature to encourage the costume to move along with the characters’ movements in a realistic way,” Cook said. “The costumes are sometimes airbrushed or even lightly sanded to ‘fade’ and ‘age’ them in certain areas so they look realistic. They’re often treated with stiffeners and fabric protector to stop them fading from the strong stage lighting or the extensive human handling.”
Along with all of the many garments created for each character, Coraline alone had over 6,3000 face replacements and 42 different wigs, according to LAIKA’s website. The hair used for the wigs was a special blend of three colors and was made of everyday hair products that included Got2Be Glued Hair Cement and Garnier Fructis Texture Paste.
Jess Lynn, LAIKA’s senior hair and fur fabricator, said each wig is made with such detail to make the movement look as real as possible.
“We’re adding a lot of movement in the story with the wig and that’s when we’ve done our job right,” Lynn said in a LAIKA Archives video. “The upside-down wig, you know, that was the first sign of where we were headed as a studio and what we wanted to do with the medium to show this moment of all these individual strands falling down just for this shot of her looking under the bed and it just makes the world so much more real.”
As a part of LAIKA’s 15-year anniversary celebration, they opened their first-ever online store on Friday for fans to purchase clothes, vinyl records, books and more from their favorite LAIKA films.
