LAIKA Studios has supernatural (animation) power
For my eighth grade Halloween, I dressed up as Coraline from the 2009 movie “Coraline.” I sprayed my hair a bright blue — or as best as I possibly could, anyway — and paired it with a bright yellow raincoat and bright yellow rain boots. Although it took people who had watched “Coraline” to understand that I was, in fact, the titular character, that Halloween I felt like an intrepid (and bitter) explorer, feeling like I’d adopted a new persona even if it was only for a day.
Why did my eighth grade self choose to dress up as Coraline? Well, my eighth grade self thought that “Coraline,” produced by the formidable stop-motion company LAIKA Studios, was a testament to the power of animated storytelling. If you asked me today, I’d still say the same.
“Coraline” is one of those animated films that I think thrives on both artistic and narrative fronts. Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name, this story about Coraline Jones, a young girl who steps into a new, seemingly idealistic world with ideal versions of her parents, feels incredibly engaging. With all the careful detail that the stop-motion animators paid to crafting each character, how the story is rendered for the screen lends an atmospheric depth.
“Coraline” showed my eighth grade self that animation didn’t necessarily have to be comedic and family-friendly. Classified as a dark fantasy horror film by Horror Film Wiki, “Coraline” uses the different freedoms associated with animation to take its character into a whole other world with supernatural, grotesque consequences. That kind of visual complexity — for the film, illustrated most visibly in the contrast between these two worlds — is a quality that I would only hope to achieve in my own scripts for my “Writing for Animation” class.
As someone who watches mostly animated comedy films, the influence “Coraline” has had on me might seem a bit unexpected. After all, many of my own scripts have leaned towards the genre of dark fantasy by virtue of my own fascination with social messaging and how horror can represent issues to great extremes. (For USC students who are looking for a screenwriting class in SCA, “Writing for Animation” offers a comprehensive introduction.)
Looking back, though, it’s undeniable that “Coraline,” as an animated adaptation of a novel, showcased my two primary interests: literary adaptation and animation. For the latter, I became a fan of LAIKA Studios because of “Coraline,” which drew me to 2012’s “ParaNorman,” a film that I similarly found instrumental in my own study of animated stories. “ParaNorman,” about a boy with the ability to see ghosts, is another example of how the supernatural is imagined through the medium of animation.
This past summer, I interned for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in the Academy Film Archive. Although I worked primarily remotely on the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Project, I was able to witness the importance of archival processes in the times I visited the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study. Even as someone who doesn’t intend on becoming a film archivist, that experience exposed me to the world of public access.
LAIKA Studios has devoted itself to this mission of behind-the-scenes preservation, which has solidified my belief in the studio’s ability to make its animators’ talents available to the public. This September, they announced the “LAIKA Archives” series, released on YouTube, which gives users a look at the different elements involved in creating the studio’s films. In one of these videos, costume designer Deb Cook shows audiences the nuances in costuming.
According to Cook in the video, Mel Jones, Coraline’s mother in the real world, has a “schlumpy” sweater with loose jeans, giving off a faded appearance. The Other Mother, on the “other” hand (I had to include this pun), has shinier pants with a more “tailored” sweater. These aesthetic differences add to the thematic symbolism of the two mothers, where the Other Mother represents the illusion that Coraline nearly chooses and Coraline’s real mother represents the reality that Coraline needs to sacrifice.
It’s amazing to me that LAIKA has made the intention behind these pieces and their films available to fans of the studios in this digital, digestible format. One thing I’ll carry with me from my time working in an archival space is that engagement with the public should always be at the forefront of filmmakers’ minds. After all, archives are places of preserving memory — like the one that I think of about my eighth grade Halloween — but, as LAIKA demonstrates, they’re also places where we can think about how films, in all their fantastic identities, are made behind the screen.
Valerie Wu is a senior writing about animation and digital arts from a contemporary perspective. Her column “Animated” runs every other Tuesday.