As the days get shorter and the trees take on autumnal hues, many revisit movies they associate with the Halloween season. A common fall favorite is Henry Selick’s adaptation of Coraline, a stop-motion animated film that debuted in 2009. Coraline was produced by LAIKA, an animation studio known for stop-motion animation. The film manages to be both magically whimsy and hauntingly unsettling as it follows eleven-year-old Coraline Jones and her encounters with the “Other Mother.”
Stop-motion animation involves taking thousands of individual photos while slowly moving objects or 3D models across a scene. These photos are then strung together, each on screen for a fraction of a second. This form of animation is extremely time consuming and tedious; it took the animation team four years to capture the 144,000 frames that make up Coraline. However, over the course of production, the film revolutionized the stop-motion animation industry by utilizing new techniques.
While Coraline was being produced, 3D printing was an emerging technology not yet widely used by the stop motion industry. Sculptor and model maker Brian McLean saw the potential 3D printing had for stop motion animation and found ways to blend it with traditional stop-motion animation methods. They used a technique called rapid prototyping, which uses 3D printing to create models and prototypes to test and refine designs. They combined this with the traditional technique of replacement animation, where interchangeable parts are used to allow fluid and lifelike movements. This allowed the characters in Coraline to have a wide range of emotions, ranging from subtle to very expressive. Coraline’s doll alone had over 6000 different printed faces, which gave her the potential for more than 200,000 facial expressions. The introduction of 3D printing to the industry allowed for stop motion animation to become significantly more expressive and efficient. The hundreds of highly detailed character pieces and props can be created and replicated quicker and more accurately than those done by hand. Additionally, if pieces break during production, broken parts can quickly be replaced.
Coraline’s success propelled LAIKA to produce more stop-motion animated films, like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Kubo and the Two Strings specifically was only possible due to the 3D printing advancements that occurred during Coraline. The film was an ambitious endeavor, with massive puppets and a complex narrative. Like Coraline, it relied on rapid prototyping to create the unique faces of the different characters—which included a talking monkey and a humanoid beetle. In comparison to Coraline’s 6000 faces, main character Kubo had over 60,000. Similarly, in LAIKA’s following film, Missing Link, 3D printing laid the foundation for full color resin printers which allowed more detailed and complex character models. Films from other studios, like Monkeypaw Production’s Wendell & Wild, have also been able to utilize the developments made during Coraline. Wendell & Wild’s unique character design and smooth animation and lip-syncing were made possible through 3D modelling.
Coraline paved the way for modern stop-motion animation. As technology continues to evolve, only time will tell how new productions continue to push the limits of the medium.
