coraline Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Neil Gaiman, the darling of comic book and fantasy fans everywhere, has been alluding to a short film project he's been working on on Twitter. Apparently, his fans aren't the only ones who can't resist snapping up his every project, because Variety is reporting the British TV channel has already picked up the short film as part of a "12 Days of Christmas" series.

Gaiman, who is very open to fan interaction and uses Twitter both effectively and charmingly, Tweeted in August, "Oh good. I have my star, who was my first (and only) choice. I have a costume designer. We agree about things. This is fun."

The dapper Bill Nighy is the star of Gaiman's short silent film which is "a love story involving two statues and Christmas shoppers." We can, no doubt, expect music from Gaiman's muse and collaborator Amanda Palmer for the soundtrack. it's so cool that he wrote a short silent movie screenplay, got it made, and sold it all in one summer. Such is the power of Neil.

The real question is, when does the rest of the world get to see it? Can we hope that Neil releases the film the same way he released videos of him reading The Graveyard Book to adoring audiences around the world?

So, fan girls and boys, let's hope this holiday season will bring another treat under the tree or Hanukkah bush from the prolific author behind Coraline (the book), American Gods, Stardust (the book), Anansi Boys, and of course, the graphic novel series Sandman. Along with that lump of coal you no doubt deserve.

Are we in a golden age of animation? To start, Pixar just keeps getting better and better; critics almost unanimously voted WALL-E the best picture of 2008 -- not just the best animated film, but the best film. And their new Up has racked up nearly equal praise. So far two of the best films I've seen in 2009 are animated features, Henry Selick's Coraline and Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues. Coraline was filmed in stop-motion 3D, and Sita was mostly hand-drawn with some computer assist. Filmmakers seem to have perfected 3D this year, not only in live-action features, but in animated features like Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, Battle for Terra and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Computer animation, which recently looked like it was going to take over for good, has now simply become one of the many tools an animator can use: Disney has gone back to hand-drawn this year with the upcoming The Princess and the Frog, and Hayao Miyazaki's hand-drawn Ponyo is also opening Stateside soon. And best of all, some animated features are being aimed at grown-ups, such as Sita Sings the Blues and Tatia Rosenthal's terrific $9.99. In recent years, even the Oscar-nominated short films have been released to theaters as a collection. And there are still at least half-a-dozen more big films coming out by the end of the year (including 9, Astro Boy, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc.)

Watchmen Director's Cut
It may not have been exactly what Joel Silver was once scheming up, but Zack Snyder's adaptation is at the top of this week's new release list, with more goodness not included in the theatrical release. Blending new twists with a number of scenes straight out of the book, Watchmen is a film that Peter called "sledgehammer entertainment." Buy it. Also out on Blu-ray. (And big fans will want to also check out the Collector's Corner section for more Watchmen goodness.)

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Coraline
Coraline slips into another world and finds an alternate version of her life that quickly turns from laughs to frights. Stop-motion animation in 3D, with a kickass female star, all from the mind of Neil Gaiman. In her review, Jette said it "is gorgeously fantastic, in all senses of the word." Buy it. Also on Blu-ray.

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The Great Buck Howard
And with this, we've got all great picks this week! The Great Buck Howard boasts John Malkovich in another classically crazy role, plus both father and son Hanks in the story of a struggling and aged mentalist desperate for his next big break. But the ultimate reason to check it out: In his review, Scott said the film "might be the most affectionate look back at old-school entertainment since Peter O'Toole boozed his way through My Favorite Year." That's high praise indeed. Buy it. Also on Blu-ray.

Add to Netflix queue | Buy at Amazon

Also out: Robot Chicken: Star Wars - Episode II, Echelon Conspiracy, Messengers 2: The Scarecrow, Super Capers, Skeleton Crew

Bet you didn't know there's a Shockwave game for Year One. That's because Shockwave, well, kinda sucks. I can't even get the game to play on my Mac; I tried Safari and Firefox, so if anyone would like to give it a whirl and report back let me know. So far all I know is that you try and herd ox without making them nervous and run away.

Granted, Sony's Year One is not exactly a property ripe for video game adaptation, and its target audience is much broader than movies whose studios put in a lot of effort at viral buzz, but if it's that the case, why bother even making one at all? It's shoddy and looks like the marketing department already knew Year One (which I liked, by the way) would already be poorly reviewed and have a weak box office showing despite the big names attached.

On the other hand, The Dark Knight, which was distributed by Warner Bros., built up a ton of online buzz from its viral websites like WhySoSerious.com, Friends of Harvey Dent, and others with help from the marketing company 42 Entertainment. The Dark Knight would have been very successful even without these sites, which took a lot of effort and money to put together. Same with the campaign for Terminator Salvation and its Skynet Research site. It's a no-brainer summer blockbuster, destined to rake in the bucks despite the many complaints from critics and fans.

Yes, yes, I know, the "book to film to musical to TV show to web series to comic book" multimedia exploitation explosion feels a bit played out nowadays. Still, a good story is a good story, and I'm always interested when an artist in one medium dreams up a novel way to adopt a creative work from a different medium. Such is the case with Stephen Merritt and his plans for a musical version of Coraline, detailed at Vanity Fair.

Neil Gaiman created Coraline, with illustrations by Dave McKean, as a book for young readers, though it left at least one adult (our own Eugene Novikov) looking at it with "amazement bordering on disbelief." Henry Selick directed the marvelous film version, also titled Coraline, which our reviewer Jette Kernion called "gorgeously fantastic, in all senses of the word." (I loved it too.) The stage version features music and lyrics by Merritt, and 35 pianos "are the only instruments used," Vanity Fair says. Why pianos? "The piano is a symbol of domesticity and middle-class life," Merritt told VF. "The prepared piano is a symbol of the avant-garde attack on that domesticity, and the toy piano is a symbol of childhood." Musician Phyllis Chen dashes around the stage to play all 35 pianos.

Previews for Coraline began at the MCC Theater in New York last week, with the official opening set for June 1. If you can't make it to New York, a graphic novel version of the story, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell, will go on sale on June 24.

400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.

Of the 100 or so new movies I've seen so far in 2009, only two of them have been great, and both of those have been animated. The first was Henry Selick's Coraline (111 screens), about which you've no doubt heard. The second one has been quietly playing on a few screens around the country and it opens this week at the Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco. Oddly, if you go to the film's official website, you'll find that it's also available for free streaming or download, and you can request that your local PBS station broadcast it. You can also order DVDs -- when they're finished. The film is not in 3D, it's not CGI-animated, and it has no fart jokes. It's Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues.

Billed as "the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told," Sita Sings the Blues is based on the epic Ramayana. It tells the tale of Sita, who falls in love with the king's son Rama. Rama is banished from his kingdom for 14 years, and Sita accompanies him; they make the best of their life in exile. Unfortunately, an evil multi-headed king kidnaps Sita. Rama eventually rescues her with the help of a monkey-man called Hanuman, but he can no longer trust her "purity." Paley does not adapt this story literally. Rather, she takes several, simultaneous approaches, with several different artistic styles. In one version, Sita lip-syncs to old records by jazz singer Annette Hanshaw and magically, the songs ("Lover Come Back to Me," etc.) fit exactly.

Henry Selick, the magic man behind painstaking puppetry in movies like Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas, is thinking way out of the 3D box. As the featured keynote speaker at this year's National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas, Selick discussed "how digital technology has helped to revitalize the handcrafted approach of stop-motion animation." This was clearly apparent from Coraline, which even in its limited theatrical run made $74.8M, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Selick also discussed the limits of 3D filmmaking; besides the cost and the time involved, 3D films have a limited time on the big screen because there just aren't as many theaters able to project 3D films. Now that the industry is hyping 3D, there are more films competing for those precious few theaters equipped with the technology. (Whether or not anyone really needed to see the Jonas Brothers's purity rings up close in three glorious dimensions is another story altogether.) Pixar's Up is even premiering at Cannes.

Meanwhile, DreamWorks's Jeffrey Katzenberg has been talking up 3D tech for years, and at a mini-preview of Monsters vs. Aliens I attended, even discussed the possibility of people eventually buying their own hip, stylish 3D glasses. Personally, I think 3D can make even the shoddiest movie ten times cooler -- I mean, what other reason is there to see the remake of My Bloody Valentine other than to duck a very realistic pick-axe aiming for your eye?

There are good writers, there are great writers, and then there's Neil Gaiman, who inspires slack-jawed awe. His omnibus Fragile Things contains my all-time favorite short story, "A Study in Emerald"; I don't want to give away too much, because I think you should read it for yourself, but suffice it to say that it begins as very clearly one thing, and slowly, organically turns into something else entirely. Gaiman's ability to tell a fully-formed, absorbing story while moving between genres with confidence and grace is nothing short of astonishing. His brand of fantasy may not be for everyone, but as a writer – in terms of versatility and control of the form – he is second to no one.

In the afterword to one of the more recent editions of Coraline, Gaiman calls the short novel his proudest achievement as an author. He's right to be proud. Some people are stunned to learn that Henry Selick's recent animated adaptation was made using stop-motion: frame-by-frame manipulation of physical objects and sets. I look at the book with a similar sort of amazement bordering on disbelief. It's an remarkably meticulous and effective work, such a stylistic and formal balancing act that it almost seems fragile.

Coraline begins by lulling you into complacency. We know it's a "children's book," and the opening pages are filled with the lovable naiveté, repetition, and short, declarative sentences we usually associate with writing for tykes. And so we settle in for a gentle children's fantasy story. The title heroine will have an adventure – scary, but not too scary – learn some lessons, and give her parents a big hug when it's all over.

Nic Cage-heavy advertising propelled Knowing to the top of the box office and a decent $24 million opening weekend, though we'll see what happens once audiences get a load of what this exceedingly weird movie is actually about. The arrival of Monsters vs. Aliens won't help either. I expect at least a 50% drop-off next week.

What's interesting about the $18 million bow for I Love You, Man is that I'm pretty sure the movie got an assist from the Judd Apatow brand even though Judd Apatow didn't have a damn thing to do with it. It's Paul Rudd + Jason Segel + tone. People love these clever, raunchy male-fantasy movies, and there's no end in sight. On the other hand, Duplicity may have come off as too smart for the room, as pervasive marketing, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts didn't amount to more than $14 million for Tony Gilroy's film. That's more than Gilroy's Michael Clayton ever made in a weekend, but that movie was platformed.

Watchmen's looking like $115 million at the end of the day. Other holdovers are looking more impressive: Coraline and Madea Goes to Jail are still bumming around the top 10 after seven and five weeks, respectively; the latter is by far Tyler Perry's highest-grossing film, while the former has parlayed a $16 million opening to what will be an $80 million finish.

The full top 10 after the jump.

In a move that comes as little surprise to anyone who saw the opening weekend grosses for You Guys Are No Hannah Montana: The 3D Concert Experience, it appears that most 3D-equipped screens will be bringing back the critically acclaimed and fairly successful Coraline as a proper theatrical experience starting this Friday. (Make that one less excuse for the animation-savvy likes of Mr. Weinberg. Guy lurves the stuff.)

According to Box Office Mojo, seventy percent of Coraline's $17 million opening weekend was from 3D venues, and the film managed to gross nearly $54 million as a whole before the Jonas Brothers landed three weeks later. However, their $12.5 million opening weekend (compared to Miley Cyrus' twice-as-high opening on half as many screens) and subsequent 77% drop in attendance last weekend suggests that the remaining fortnight before Monsters vs. Aliens lands would be best suited to a film that might still draw a crowd, one of a significantly broader demographic appeal.

Okay, so all numbers aside, families who haven't seen it yet should find it considerably more inventive than the likes of Race to Witch Mountain (though I still wouldn't take the youngest tykes), and anyone else interested now has a chance to catch it proper before it's replaced by another 3D offering that I can only presently assure you will be equally worth your while and dollar.