I saw Coraline. I know, SHOCKER, but I found out some cool stuff about it and I wanted to share. Whilst at the Final Cut Pro class, I happened upon a magazine called Post. It had an article all about how Coraline was made. First of all, I didn’t particularly like Coraline. It had brief moments of awesome-itude, but the story as a whole was lacking, in my opinion. This is a constant problem for me with fantasy and science fiction. Since you could make anything up, I feel the author has to work much, much harder to keep me involved. For example, Coraline has to find three sets of eyeballs so ghosts can be set free from eternal bonds. But she’s also really conveniently given a green triangular ring that when she looks through it, she can see where the eyes are. To me, that’s too easy. That problem was too easily solved by a random object invented by the author. Too simple. Something interesting about the film was that it was so distant for me and I was so not into whatever the characters were going through that things that would normally freak me out didn’t bother me at all. I am scared of little-kiddie-related stuff, like dolls and xylophone toys. There’s a ton of that in this film, as well as people with buttons for eyes having their faces stitched into permanent smiles, and I didn’t even flinch. However, there are moments of extreme beauty and exquisite design, and it’s worth it for that. Also, there’s a man upstairs with a jerboa circus. What’s a jerboa, you ask? It is a hopping kangaroo rat type thing. Lookit:
http://www.hawar-islands.com/blog/media/blogs/kuwait/Lesser-Jerboa.jpg
I desperately want a jerboa circus. Nay, I NEED a jerboa circus. But enough of that. I read a couple things in Post that were interesting. I will now quote:
In Coraline, the character’s replacement heads are molded in a computer-controlled 3D printer that allows for precise gradations and nuances of expressions. Mouths have teeth in them, and tongues, and more. …Computers also erased rigs used to support characters and erased the faint line that exists in a replacement head where the head’s lower half (which includes the mouth) meets the character’s upper head. …Back on The Nightmare Before Christmas, the lead character, Jack Skellington, had around 800 different sculpted facial expressions. As opposed to Jack Skellington, Coraline has over 205,000 different possible expressions.
B. had commented on how impressed he was that there was no dust on the set in the final film, and I’m now thinking that if there was dust, it was taken out later with computers. I would love to see an exhibit of the sets and models one day. Hopefully they’ll come out with a book on it soon.
