Para-nimation

A model of the title character's house from "ParaNorman" on display at an Arclight theater.

There's a nice article about Laika in the New York Times today. While not tremendously in-depth, it's a neat bit of context for the release of the Portland studio's"ParaNorman" this Friday.
Moving Ahead in Stop Motion/With ‘ParaNorman,’ Laika Aims to Push Animation Boundaries

It's a wonderful and fairly astounding thing that not one but several studios are busy making animated features in this viscerally appealing, supposedly "throwback" technique.  At SIGGRAPH in 2008 Laika had a booth filled with puppets, sets and props from their then-unreleased "Coraline"; I could have stared at it all for hours, and the resulting film was a happy experience-different, moody, ambitious, and in many moments and respects very beautiful.

When I was launched on the Aardman/Dreamworks production "Flushed Away" in 2008 I went into the conference room to hear a pitch of the film and get my first assignment. Before they began the directors, David Bowers and Sam Fell, put a puppet of a character from "Chicken Run"-Fetcher the rat-into my hands. At that point it was going to be a stop motion, not CG, film. Looking at this little plasticine figure in his miniscule tatty clothes, charming, completely solid and three dimensional, was an inspiration; I just wanted to see him move-to act.
Artists have a tremendous soft spot for handmade things, don't we?

Shane P. and Shannon T. and Coraline J.

Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle are swell guys: friendly, generous with thoughts and props, and fun. They also draw and design like a bat out of heck.
At top is an example of Shane's work; Shannon's is below; click to enlarge them(and there's much more where they came from-see the links below to their blogs).

Dreamworks has them right now, but several years ago they were working on a stop-motion feature based on an exceptional book by Neil Gaiman, my new favorite author(be sure to read his latest, "The Graveyard Book", which just won the Newbery medal as the outstanding children's book of the year-also keeping in mind that in my opinion Gaiman, like all great authors, doesn't write so much for children as for himself).



I went to see "Coraline" on Sunday. It's a film that both men gave a lot to, along with many other brilliant artists.
I should probably do a separate post just about the film, but for now here's a sampling of some beautiful work Shane is sharing on his own blog, and Shannon's equally inspiring paintings are here. Go see--there's a lot more and it's all simply wonderful.

Lastly, here's a link to what's far and away the best of the several Coraline trailers, on YouTube. Really worth watching, even if you've seen the others.