TORONTO - It's remarkable that something as innocent as a pair of buttons can seem terrifying.
Two plastic discs take the place of eyes in the creepy characters that inhabit the world of "Coraline," a new 3-D, stop-motion animated film based on Neil Gaiman's dark and twisted children's book of the same name.
As a novella, "Coraline" was an award-winning bestseller that drew praise for its sinister fantasy, while scaring the pants off more than a few reviewers. Gaiman says he was surprised that adults seemed more horrified by the button-eyed characters in his 2002 fairy tale than children, and soon developed a theory on why that is.
"I would have 55-year-old journalists coming up to me and saying, 'How can you subject a child to this? I finished the book at 3 o'clock in the morning and I walked around the house and turned on all the lights and sat there hugging myself until dawn, I was so terrified,' " Gaiman says while seated on a hotel couch for a recent round of media interviews in Toronto.
"With kids, (they) read it as an adventure and love it. Because it's an exciting adventure about somebody like them who doesn't have any super powers - there's nothing special about Coraline other than she's smart and she's brave and she's going to keep going and she goes up against something very nasty that has kidnapped her parents and she wins."
"Adults are reading about a child in danger. And a child in danger, I think for many adults, is the most scary thing there could possibly be."
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Director Henry Selick wrote the screenplay for the film, "Coraline," and it closely follows the original storyline - a lonely girl and her neglectful parents move to a dreary old house on a hill, where boredom soon consumes the inquisitive child. Coraline is drawn to a mysterious hidden door in the sitting room and discovers that it leads to a magical parallel universe where she's the centre of attention.
Things are not quite as they appear though, and Coraline slowly discovers that her doting "other mother" - an eerie twin of her real mother, except that she has black buttons where her eyes should be - is not so sweet, and wants more from Coraline than mere affection.
Gaiman says he sought out Selick to adapt "Coraline" for the big screen as soon as he finished a draft of the book. The British author had been impressed by Selick's work on the 1993 stop-motion fantasy film "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and felt that stop-motion animation would be a fantastic way to reinterpret his creepy creation.
"I love...the reality of stop motion, the fact that everything you're looking at exists, everything is real," says Gaiman, whose most recent kids' offering, "The Graveyard Book," won the John Newbery Medal for children's literature last month.
"It wasn't made in a computer, somebody had to build it, somebody had to paint it. If it's moving that's because somebody has reached in and moved it a tiny little bit. And I just thought that was fabulous. But it also gives you a level of unreality, which I think for a story like this, which in the wrong hands could be absolutely nightmarish, allows it to be kind of safe."
Gaiman's deft approach to horrific themes has made him a rock star among authors.
His acclaimed novels include "American Gods," "Stardust" and "Neverwhere," and his graphic novel series, "The Sandman," revolutionized comics in the early '90s.
Gaiman's rich imagination has found a place in several films and TV projects, as well. The 48-year old, who also wrote the screenplay for the 2007 3-D film "Beowulf" among others, boasts that the 3-D-effects on "Coraline" are the best anyone has seen so far.
"If you are into film, you want to see 'Coraline' just to see what people can do because it's no longer about somebody throwing things at the screen, it's not about things coming at you," Gaiman says.
"It's about using 3-D as a storytelling device to make everything deeper and stranger."
Gaiman's recent stop in Canada was solely to promote the opening of "Coraline," but he says on his blog that he expects to return this summer for special appearances in Toronto and Montreal.
"Coraline" opens across Canada on Friday.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001LF4IA6/almosthuman
http://chitika.com/publishers.php?refid=almosthuman99
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