Coraline Character animation

The first thing you notice about Coraline is that her hair is bright blue, this is to make her stand out from the rest of the characters in the story, she also wears very bright clothes, and for example she wears a bright coat. This is to make her stand out as a character against everyone else in both worlds; this creates a focus on her as the main character. She is open and wants to spend a lot of time outdoors; you can again see this from her clothing in the beginning of the film.  Coraline is very brightly coloured in comparison to the other characters in the ‘boring’ world this is to show she is interesting and is adventurous.

The character of Coraline is animated using stop motion the faces are used in a way to show a great amount of expressions, the bottom of the face is clipped onto the model to allow a range of animations; also the top of the head can be changed the way in which she is animated; movement wise is very strong she is a girl a girl that knows what she likes. She is also very caricatured, she has extremely thin legs and she also has a very skinny body. With regards to her face she large eyes and the rest of her features like nose and mouth are very small; I think this gives focus to her eyes and eyebrow so the audience get the emotion that is being emitted from the puppet.

From the way that Corlaine has been made and the way she is animated, she is slightly ‘dorky’ with the larger ears. From the research into this particular character I have found out that a large amount of work goes into stop motion especially when rigging is included. To create the complete effect of Coraline CGI animation was also used.

The cat in Coraline is very mysterious and is animated in that way as he slinks around and appears and disappeared, the voice actor used for the character fits the idea very well. To make the character shadowy like he has a secret he is animated very slowly and walks light in his feet, he is all black and his eyes are huge. As an animal that can talk anthropomorphism is used and this makes the cat a very important character. Again stop motion is used which creates a unique finish that makes the cat very rough around the edges like there is a story behind his life and like he is very old and has gone through a lot. He is wise and knows what is going on in the ‘other’ world.