Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” is all about dichotomy and duplication, what the two sides of the same coin can actually be like -- something Two-Face would appreciate. Fitting then, that “Coraline” itself is being duplicated, so that there will be two versions out next year – one on the big screen, and one on the stage.
The story -- in which a girl swaps her real life/ parents for a mirror world and replica parents, only to have her dream world turn sinister -- was first set to be adapted as a 3D stop-motion film by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”). Laika is in the late stages of filming the project, to be released February 2009.
“It’s the largest stop-motion production anyone’s ever done,” Gaiman said. “There are 40-something sets, and it’s absolutely astonishing. Things move one frame at a time. Intellectually, I thought I understood that, but it wasn’t until I was in the theater, watching a rehearsal, that I realized why it is you’re lucky to get a handful of footage every day. It’s more impressive than with a computer, because it’s real.”
The filmmakers commissioned They Might Be Giants to write songs for the movie. One song is for John Hodgman (as the Other Father) to sing to Coraline, “where the piano comes to life and plays him,” Gaiman said. (The cast is rounded out by Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher, as Coraline and her mother and the Other Mother).
But then, independent of the film, Stephin Merritt from the Magnetic Fields started writing songs inspired by “Coraline” as well -- enough songs that he’s turned it into a musical to launch next May in New York. Won’t people be confused?
“This is ‘Coraline,’ too,” Gaiman said. “They’re completely different Coralines. Henry wanted to make a film, Stephin wanted to make a musical, and I said yes to both. And the weird way things happen, they’ll both be finished in February. So I suggested to Stephin that he hold off on his so as not to confuse people.”
Though Gaiman’s heard about 70 percent of the songs in the musical so far, they were each recorded by Merritt, so he was acting out all five characters, “and they all sound like him,” Gaiman said. “So I won’t know what it really sounds like until we get the different actors on stage, with different voices, who don’t sound like Stephin Merrit. But it sounds lovely so far.”
The two “Coraline”s are “very different experiences with very different songs, both by people I love,” Gaiman said. “But they’re both really cool.”
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