The (Unofficial) Art of 'Coraline'

Putting together a new resource.

Concept art by Stef Choi for Coraline (2009)

Happy Sunday! This is a special edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, unlike any we’ve done before. In a way, it’s book-length.

Coraline (2009) is our favorite project to date from Laika, the Portland stop-motion outfit. Based on a Neil Gaiman story, it’s a spooky, whimsical and weird animated fairy tale. And its visual style remains one-of-a-kind even now.

There have been art books for Laika’s ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, The Boxtrolls and Missing Link. Which is to say: for all of its feature films, except Coraline. The one related book, Coraline: A Visual Companion, goes into the making of the film but doesn’t have much concept art. There’s never been an Art of Coraline.

With no official home, this work scattered. Artists from the crew shared it here and there. It cropped up in auctions, Laika posted a little around online and sites like Character Design References gathered what they could. It’s been piecemeal.

A follower brought this to our attention in a serious way last month. When we tweeted a few Coraline concept pieces, they replied:

So many insane concepts we only got from blogspots and places long dead :'( Wishing for a proper artbook release still. Remember being star struck by Tadahiro Uesugi’s art T_T love on first sight

It made us think: is there a way to round up and credit Coraline’s art, including the lost stuff? Maybe a blog page?

Or, just maybe, could we put it together into a free PDF?

That last idea excited us, and we started to take it seriously. The release of the fan-made art book Drawing for Nothing around a week later confirmed that we were on the right track. We kept going.

And so, today, we’re putting The Unofficial Art of Coraline online as a free educational resource, and as a tribute to Laika’s work. It’s over 150 pages long.

You’ll find the links to view or download the PDF lower in the issue. First, though: a quick exploration of what’s inside.

Two spreads from The Unofficial Art of Coraline

The look of Coraline was a collaborative thing. Tadahiro Uesugi, the famous illustrator, had an important hand in it. But many others did, too — like Dan Krall and Shane Prigmore, who created Coraline’s final character design. Artists like Stef Choi, Jon Klassen and Chris Appelhans touched the style and world. And storyboarders like Vera Brosgol mattered a lot in setting up the stuff we see on screen.

We’ve tried to reflect the breadth of artistic talent that went into Coraline. There are gaps, depending on what we could and couldn’t track down, but we wanted to focus on the whole team as much as we could.

Similarly, we’ve chosen to let that team speak for itself. We drew quotes from making-of videos, retro interviews, dead blogs, tweets, 14-year-old recordings of live events and more. They’re the throughline of the PDF.

The Unofficial Art of Coraline starts with the design of the film’s style and world, then moves into characters — from Coraline and her parents to Other Mother and Other Father. As we learn from Shane Prigmore, director Henry Selick hired him to create almost every facial expression used in the film:

[Henry] knew I was an animator in the past. He was like, “I want you to design all the expressions and mouth shapes. I want you to test these things. I want this to be the coolest face animation that’s ever been done in stop motion.” ... [I did] hundreds and hundreds of these drawings to make sure the design stuck. So that there was a design to the movement and the performances. Which I think paid off in the end ... The animators took this stuff and went crazy.

Later parts of the PDF look at the storyboards — including Andy Schuhler’s nightmarish take on a sequence with Other Father — and the puppet-making. (As costume designer Deborah Cook notes, “No purchased garments were used at all, not even doll clothes, as they’re actually far too big … Barbie’s jeans, for example, are more than twice the size of Coraline’s.”)

Two more spreads from the PDF

As we assembled this art, we tried hard to attach the right names to it. Proper crediting matters to us. There may still be mistakes to fix — this is labeled as a “first edition” for a reason. If you find anything out of place, please let us know.

With all that said, you’ll find links to access The Unofficial Art of Coraline below. The fastest and easiest option is to read it in-browser via the Internet Archive. We’ve also included a direct download link:

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Read in-browser

Download PDF (277 MB)

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And that’s that! We hope you’ll enjoy the PDF. Putting it together this past week has been a whirlwind — we’re looking forward to a short rest before our next issue on Thursday. It feels good to send it out into the world.

See you again soon!