9 and Coraline

Watch this:


Tim Burton is making this into a movie which should be pretty cool...as long as he doesn't mess it up like he did with Charlie and the Chocolate factory.

I just watched Coraline 3-D and it was awesome.

'Coraline': Making the most of 3D

Selick describes this scenario as "Alice in Wonderland" meets "Hansel and Gretel." Moviegoers might recognize more than a little bit of "The Wizard of Oz."

It took several years for the filmmakers to come up with their own version of sepia-tone Kansas and Technicolor Oz. Selick took the unpublished manuscript of the book to Bill Mechanic, a producer of the movie, who had worked with him on past films.

Initially Mechanic thought "Coraline" would be live action too, but Selick's push for animation prevailed. Still, Mechanic said he considered stop motion "kind of passe" and cast around for ways to make it "showier." He suggested that half the movie be shot in stop motion and the other half in CGI.

But the alternative reality, in Mechanic's words, "didn't really do the wow"; it didn't look special enough for Coraline to want to stay, or for audiences to be impressed. That's when 3-D, which had only recently become technically viable thanks to better technology and more comfortable glasses, came into the picture.

But with the entire movie now in 3-D, Selick and his colleagues still needed to find a way to make the alternative world stand out, literally. Selick's solution was to flatten the colors and "crush" the sets in the real world. Coraline's bedroom, the kitchen, the apartments upstairs and down: All these locations were compressed through the use of forced perspective and sets pitched forward toward the camera. For the alternative reality, the colors were deepened, the sets built out and the 3-D cranked up.