'Coraline' : Why You Should Be Excited ... and a Little Bit Scared (Continued) 

Will Gaiman fans be pleased?

It's a risky thing to adapt a beloved book for the big screen.

But Henry Selick, the director of "Coraline," had high hopes when he first saw the manuscript eight years ago -- before it was even out. Gaiman sent it to him to consider, which is a good sign for fans. And Selick was delighted with what he read.

"I felt you could practically shoot the book. I really felt it was ready to go as a movie," he said. Then comes the kicker: "I was terribly wrong. Books aren't movies."

He introduced a new character to help bridge the gap, a boy named Wybie who helps bring some of the thoughts Coraline experienced in the book into dialogue. (Otherwise, you'd have a cheesy voiceover narrator, or Coraline would have to talk with herself.)

Selick remains mindful of the fans. "I think [the movie] holds on to all the essentials and celebrates them."

How does it look?

You can definitely see the connection between other Selick movies: "The Nightmare Before Christmas," "James and the Giant Peach" and "Coraline" (though less of his work on those insanely memorable Pillsbury Doughboy commercials shines through).

"Coraline" is both creepy and elegant, and its look is inspired by the Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi, whom Selick hired to create the two-dimensional inspiration for the sets.

Every detail has been considered, from the size of the tiny, bendable drinking straws in the characters' cups, to the necessity for miniature kneecaps in the Coraline character when she is kneeling. Selick has been particular about detail, including how much of it appears. This can be a tricky thing when you're working with a couple hundred of the best animators, sculptors, painters and other artists in the business. They each want their pieces to be as spectacular as possible. This can sometimes be a problem.

"Too much beauty is no beauty at all," he said. "It's selectively turning many things down so that what matters has more punch and power."

This is the instinct that turns great skill with drawing, painting and sculpture into art, and what gets people tingling about the prospect of the movie.

What's more, the 3-D could very well be as groundbreaking as color was in "The Wizard of Oz."

Color had appeared in movies before "Oz," just as 3-D has been used in many other movies besides this. But Selick is using it as a storytelling device, not just eye candy. When Coraline first moves into her new house, she feels claustrophobic and bored. Correspondingly, the sets here are more two-dimensional. When she discovers the other world, the dimensions get stretched. Even if viewers can't articulate the difference, they'll feel it.

Travis Knight, the lead animator on the film, put it this way: "It does further the experience. It's a new language that's developing, and this new movie uses it very appropriately."

Some fun tidbits

Everything on the Coraline set is made by hand, from the drinking straws to the dying grass (which, by the way, is made from faux fur brushed to just the right length and painted just the right shade of miserable gray).

The puppets vary in size from one-fourth scale to three times as large, depending on the level of detail needed in the shot. But each one is a marvel. The team members first design a character in two dimensions, to get the look and personality just right. Then they sculpt the characters, and make molds so that they can have many versions of the same tiny hand.

Inside the puppets are armatures -- skeletons, really -- made by a trained jewelry maker. And they really do look like pieces of jewelry.

The characters' heads are made out of silicone, which looks translucent under light -- just like real skin. The animators can swap out heads to create facial expression, and for certain really dramatic looks, can even swap out face parts. In one scene, the cat gobbles a mouse, and there is a whole box full of cat faces in various stages of mouse-consumption.

To create just one second of this movie takes 24 different shots, and animators working in darkened rooms bend over their tiny sets, making small adjustments for days on end to produce a single scene. One really complicated scene, depicting a balcony peeling away from the house, took an animator five days to produce a five-second clip.

The scale Volkswagen bugs (complete with teeny ladybug keychain) cost more than their life-size versions, and come in rain-splattered and dry versions. They hired a woman who specializes in miniature knitting to make sweaters and mittens for Coraline and the other characters, then had her make identical copies. They're unbelievable to look at.

But perhaps the best small detail is the characters' hair. Stop-motion animation has always struggled with hair, but the "head of hair" on the set figured out a way to stiffen the wigs so that individual strands could be made to create the illusion of locks blowing in the breeze.

There's a lovely scene in the book that describes Caroline, at the tail end of her adventure, rapt with the beauty of sunlight on the cat's head, "tuning each white whisker to gold. Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting."

And so it will be interesting, indeed, to see how the story plays out on the big screen. From everything I've seen, there's a lot to look forward to.

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Bonus points go to anyone who recognized that "bloopy" and "love-swoggled" come from "Pierre in Love" by Sara Pennypacker.

Martha Brockenbrough is MSN's Cinemama, for the Parents' Movie Guide. She is also the author of "It Could Happen to You: Diary of a Pregnancy and Beyond." She's also founder of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. She writes a fun-with-kids column for Cranium.com, as well as an educational humor column for Encarta. Check out her Web site.

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