'Coraline' tells of a spunky heroine in a topsy-turvy world

In an era where taciturn robots, boy wizards and hunky vampires make up modern folklore, author Neil Gaiman’s quirky tale of a gutsy heroine stands out from the pack and provides a new type of leading lady for the tween set.

Written for the screen and directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Coraline follows the titular blue-haired 11-year-old (voiced by Dakota Fanning) whose preoccupied parents and drab new neighbourhood send her looking for fun and adventure elsewhere. Possessed of only her wit and an occasional sidekick in the form of a wise cat, Coraline takes an eerie look at what can happen when you get what you wish for.

“It’s so much fun to have made something with content,” muses Gaiman while promoting the film in Los Angeles with some of the cast. “We did an industry screening…and afterwards I suddenly got a glimpse of what it must be like to be the Jonas Brothers as I was surrounded by 11-year-old girls wanting autographs, with their eyes shining.”

“There was definitely this really cool feeling of having given them something with a heroine. Somebody who doesn’t get saved by boys…and doesn’t tag along – she’s kick-ass. That in itself was a joy.”

A relative pro at voice-over work, and acting since the age of six, Fanning brings Coraline’s childish impatience and youthful curiosity to life in Selick’s ingenious and sometimes frightening big-screen adaptation. Fanning, 14, revealed she saw inherent similarities between her chosen profession and the pluckiness of her stop-motion stand-in when it came to taking risks.

“I think that when you’re doing a movie and you’re putting yourself out there, you have to have a certain amount of bravery,” she offered. “And even when you’re on the set, filming it, you’re in front of everyone and you’re doing scenes and you’re showing yourself to a lot of people and that can be intimidating at times. I feel like I am brave, maybe not in the way Coraline is, cause she’s fighting for her family. But I think I’d do the same thing that she did.”

As Coraline’s distant, inattentive mother, and ghoulish counterpart Other Mother, Teri Hatcher (“Desperate Housewives”) considered herself quite fortunate to have made her voice-over debut in a film like Coraline.

“I’ve always wanted to be in an animated film but I never dreamed I would get to be in this level of artistry,” she revealed. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Henry and Neil and then on top of it all, I got to play these three different levels of people,” she said referring to Coraline’s real mother, Other Mother and another incarnation whom she calls Evil Mother.

“I think when you think about going in to do your first animated movie, you imagine you’re going to pull out every accent you worked on as a child and every silly cartoon voice you ever imagined. But Henry had this beautiful, imaginative, visual thing happening in his mind as to how the look of the movie was going to be [and] he really wanted the voices behind it to be seamlessly real.”

For Hatcher, this meant distilling her acting methods into one medium and finding new ways to embody an animated character.

“For me, I still put my hair up in a frumpy way and stood slumpier and felt heavy and exhausted to find that voice. The Other Mother was much more postured and mannered and there was still physicality although you’re not in front of a live camera.”

Hatcher also played with pitch and tone to help signal the on-screen transformation that saw Other Mother morph from a dotting June Cleaver type to a “fashion-model insect”, as Selick put it, when Coraline refuses to sew buttons on her eyes.

While interpretation about the meaning of the button-eyes varies from the tradition of placing coins on the peepers of the dead to darkened windows to the soul – Gaiman assures both are correct – the miniature door in the wall that proves to be a secret portal is firmly rooted in his childhood memories.

“We had a house that was neatly divided in two and my family lived in the servants’ quarters. We had the good front room but the good front room had two doors. The good half of the house door was bricked up and I would walk over to it sometimes and I’d open it but it would always be bricked up,” he said, his voice lowering to a whisper. “But I was always sure if I crept up on it right or opened it the right way, it wouldn’t be a brick wall, it would be something else....”

In Coraline, Gaiman indulges his youthful fantasies, transporting our trusty heroine to an alternate world that contains sights both magical and menacing. Selick’s stop-motion visuals are whimsical, stunning and often slightly sinister, raising the question of how younger children will interpret the movie.

“For most kids, not necessarily most parents, they read Coraline as an adventure. It’s somebody their height who goes up against something nasty….I think for adults it tends to be much scarier. Adults are experiencing a story about a child in danger and we are hard-wired to worry about that. And also, for adults watching it, all sorts of long-buried childhood memories start coming to the fore and children don’t have that. They live there.”

Adults will most likely relate to Coraline’s real mother, whose career obligations and innumerable responsibilities leave her with a short fuse and little time for her attention-starved daughter, who eventually comes to appreciate her parents’ foibles.

“I think there are a lot of working families and working mothers that are just exhausted,” offered Hatcher, herself a single mother. “[They’re] trying to do it all and are so burdened with worry and it makes [parents] neglectful… but more in just a way of trying to survive."

“But I think on its deepest level, thematically, the movie shows us that children can be lured away by something that is enticing and seems like it’s going to be better. But what I love about the [film] is that you see Coraline embrace the imperfections in her parents and understand that their love is enough. I think it’s a really great message for our world right now.”

Coraline and Coraline 3D open in select Cineplex Entertainment Theatres February 6, 2009.