Coraline

I'd forgotten all about the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline that's coming out soon, but something (sigh... trainers of course) pointed me at it's website and it turns out it'll be out soon in the west. In Japan I would imagine... at some point approaching the end of time? But when it does get released people with go freakin' wild over it, The Nightmare Before Christmas is firmly entrenched as an eternal brand here.

Your first stop should be the website www.coraline.com which is one of those deep immersive jobs with all sorts of hidden stuff all over the place.


Coraline will be awesome for nigh-on innumerable reasons. Here, I will attempt to enumerate them:

1) The original book by Neil Gaiman is awesome and, frankly, terrifying.

2) It's directed by Henry Selick, who of course did The Nightmare Before Christmas and whose stop-motion style is so awesome that I still don't believe it's stop motion. I believe it to be sorcery.

3) They Might Be Giants have done some music for it, there's a song of theirs hidden away in the website somewhere. It's fantastic.

4) The voices are supplied by an almost flawlessly awesome cast including John Hodgman and Keith David. John Hodgman and Keith David! How can you fit those two in the same movie? I just ordered John Hodgman's book!

5) There are tie-in sneakers involved.

6) They also publicised it by sending out 50 unique handmade boxes of weird stuff and movie ephemera to a variety of writers and critics.

Ok, so that's just six - but it should make my point well enough. Interestingly I saw both John Hodgman and They Might Be Giants at a McSweeney's thing in London years ago which is a nice bit of serendipity.

I'm excited, but like I said with no Japanese release date in sight that excitement will have to bubble along for quite a while.

Oh... I just twigged, even when it's released over here I won't be able to see it. It's an animated movie so it'll be dubbed. Nuts.