Book review: Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft

If Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) prompted commercial Hollywood animation to look forward with both anticipation and trepidation to what has since become the medium’s fully realized digital future, then the release of Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009) almost 15 years later appears to have achieved a similar effect for the craft and creativity of stop-motion animated imagery. The techniques of frame-by-frame object and puppet animation are, of course, as old as animation itself, with the history of its earliest screen illusions fully entwined with the magical stop-frame experiments and visual trickery of pioneers like Edwin S Porter, Georges Méliès, J Stuart Blackton and Ladislas Starevich, creator of the first puppet-animated short The Beautiful Leukanida (1912). The skill and spectacle of stop-motion’s rich animated lineage would only be further refined thanks to artists and animators like Lotte Reiniger, Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Jiří Trnka, Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, as well as the UK studios Smallfilms, Cosgrove Hall and Aardman, who as stop-motion’s key figures can be collectively used to trace its historical, cultural, political and aesthetic applications throughout the 20th century. However, the release of Coraline in February 2009 as the feature-film debut of the Portland-based LAIKA Studios has served to revitalize stop-motion aesthetics in the Hollywood context and begun to transform a mainstream animated landscape that remains largely dominated by persuasive and pervasive computer graphics. An adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2002 dark fantasy novel, Coraline not only prompted an acceleration of stop-motion features produced by several national cinemas but also coincided with a renewed scholarly interest in craft labour in animation (see Ruddell and Ward, 2019) and the cultural politics of ‘de-skilling’ (Roberts, 2010).

The question, then, of how to triangulate Coraline’s contribution to the art and craft of post-millennial (stop-motion) animation in the US and beyond 15 years on is one fundamental to – and a challenge fully met by – the many authors and arguments gathered together in Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (2023). Edited by animation scholar Mihaela Mihailova and featuring a range of contributions by both academics and practitioners, the book is a welcome entry into Bloomsbury’s expanding ‘Animation Key Films/Filmmakers’ series, whose growing collection of monographs and anthologies focusing on animation’s influential pioneers and landmark works provides an entirely appropriate home for what is a sustained and rigorous critical interrogation of Coraline as a ‘prestige production’ (p. 5). Yet it is also made clear from the outset that, unlike other entries in the Bloomsbury series, this is an anthology whose interdisciplinary enquiries are not always driven by aims of recovery and restoration, given the film’s already ‘favourable’ critical and commercial reputation (p. 5), but rather of commemoration and solidification as the terms of its ongoing industrial and artistic influence upon ‘a contemporary renaissance of stop motion’ (p. 1) are astutely mapped. As Mihailova argues in her introduction, ‘Coraline [has] helped usher in a new era of stop-motion visibility’ (p. 10), a claim that provides the book with another ulterior motive to celebrate hand-crafted puppetry ‘as a unique and enduring artform’ (p. 11). Across the anthology’s 12 chapters (ordered into three sections), authors more than fulfil these complementary objectives, successfully manoeuvring the close textual analysis of individual scenes and sequences (the opening to Coraline being a particular favourite) with the salient social, cultural and technological paradigms that envelop Henry Selick’s groundbreaking film. Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft is therefore less a chronological ‘history’ of Coraline’s journey from production to reception as much as a convincing and definitive accumulation, examination and complication of the many elements that have framed the success of LAIKA’s distinguished animated debut.

The first of the book’s three sections is titled ‘Historical contexts and perspectives’, though this categorization is, perhaps, something of a misnomer. In what is a neat mirror to Coraline’s own narrative of doubling and duplication – if not the film’s broader ‘straddling’ of co-existing generic frames identified by Mihailova early on (p. 2) – many of the chapters in the opening section work together to offer an alternative set of preoccupations related to Coraline’s animated identity as a technical marvel. In chapter one, for example, Malcolm Cook’s discussion of ‘the function of drawing’ in the film (p. 21) effectively doubles as a potted history of Coraline’s move from page to screen, mapping the role of Victorian graphic artistry on its visual style and the influence of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi on the visualization of Gaiman’s fantasy world(s). In chapter two, Miriam Harris’s account of Coraline’s hybridity takes on its many intertextual influences between ‘contemporary Americana and Czech animation’ and the ‘blending of tropes’ through considerations of genre (p. 47). But like Cook who also strongly engages with ‘the extensive use of digital tools within the film’s production’ (p. 28), Harris similarly identifies the practical collusion of the ‘analogue and the digital’ (p. 51). Technological concerns then connect the modes of ‘digital hybridization’ (p. 42) described by Harris to Norman M Klein’s subsequent account in chapter four of Coraline’s 2½ D ‘puppet effects’ (p. 77).

Given that such eminent throughlines and inevitable intersections between chapter foci are not made as prominent or teased out as much as they might have been – particularly in relation to technology, craft and the handmade – there also comes the potential for the material’s broader re-organization. This is, however, a mere symptom of the book’s abundance of riches rather than its lapses in judgment. Any of the chapters in the first section, including Mihailova’s own chapter on LAIKA’s ‘particular brand of self-reflexivity’ and histories of stop-motion as a ‘production process’ (p. 60), might just as easily have appeared in the second section ‘Stop-motion technology, process and spectatorship’. The earlier discussion of Coraline’s ‘ball-and-socket metal armatures’ (p. 44) by both Harris and Klein (who likewise unpack the film’s ‘tiny kinetic sculptures that have movable joints’ as a form of puppetry, p. 79), certainly seems better suited to the technological narrative developed in section two. This is because both authors overlap with Dan Torre’s chapter in the second section on ‘replacement animation’ techniques in stop-motion that involve switching in elements of an animated figure’s body parts, and which invite philosophical ‘embodiment of a multiplicity’ (p. 102) and reflect Coraline’s narrative investment in the uncanniness of ‘shifting realities’ (p. 103). In turn, Klein’s particular conclusions regarding Coraline as a ‘dimensional arm wrestle’ go on to anticipate Jane Shadbolt’s chapter six on the ‘new vocabulary’ (p. 116) of traditional stop-motion techniques, which arise due to their pairing with the computer in ways that evidence how a ‘digital workflow is now an indivisible part of the stop-motion process’ (p. 117). Yet, situated against this strong technological narrative that appears to define the book’s opening two-thirds, the culmination of section two does conspicuously shift the conversation towards theoretical framings of Coraline’s stop-motion simulations and the critical/popular reception of its controversial register of horror. Both Ann Owen’s ‘neuroanimatic approach’ that captures Coraline’s capabilities for simulating ‘implied actions’ (p. 141) and stop-motion’s ‘haptic’ brand of spectatorship (p. 142), alongside the ‘transnational reception study’ of Rayna Denison’s contribution that compares ‘the news, magazine and trade reception for Coraline in the US and the UK’ (p. 153), therefore appear to be notable – though nonetheless highly informative – outliers in a section that ultimately seems to differ from the previous in a matter of degree rather than of kind.

The final section of the collection, however, is where the book’s conceptual parameters become fully extended and Mihailova’s aspiration to evaluate Coraline’s ‘cultural and industry impact’ (p. 2) is particularly and effectively refined. Informed by, yet breaking from, the book’s earlier conceptualizations of animation as an artistic and industrial art form, the four chapters contained in ‘Puppet politics: Ideology, identity, representation’ provide a set of rigorous ideological analyses that unfold Coraline’s themes and characters through a variety of socio-political frameworks. This section is also where concerns of spectatorship are, perhaps ironically, made more prominent than in the preceding section given how the authors are interested in the invitations that Coraline makes to symptomatic interpretation. Kodi Maier’s account in chapter nine examines fantasy as a cathartic queer space where spectators are inspired to fight the ‘dragons’ in the pursuit of social justice, documenting longstanding connections between the LGBTQIA+ community and witchcraft in relation to the necessary resistance and activism of ‘the outcast, the deviant and the queer’ (p. 172). Maier’s excellent thematic analysis of Coraline’s many images of ‘provocation and resistance’ (p. 179) in turn set the groundwork for Eric Herhuth’s subsequent chapter that, while again prioritizing the technological construction of animated characters, analyses the politics and ‘otherness of the puppet’ (p. 192) as a figure who offers ‘a generative, technical otherness associated with possibility and radical reconfigurations of self and community’ (p. 192). It is the fear of ‘becoming-puppet’ (p. 193) that, for Herhuth, anchors Coraline’s reflections of the unsettling of subjectivity and ‘reconfiguration of the self’ (p. 196) to define the threatening, frightening machinations of its puppet fantasy. The final two chapters, written by Jane Batkin and Nicholas Andrew Miller, respectively, equally share a common interest in the politics of identity through their excavation into childhood in crisis, the family and fatherhood. But, while Batkin looks at Coraline’s image of the ‘wandering child’ as a clue to modernity’s broader ‘displacement of childhood and family’ (p. 220) in ways that echo Herhuth’s discussion of Coraline’s vulnerability, disorientation and belonging, Miller uses the father to claim for the film as ultimately a ‘fable of paternal pedagogy’ (p. 226).

As the introductory remarks to the collection establish, issues of ‘renaissance’ and ‘visibility’ emerge as critical terms and driving concepts that strongly recur throughout Mihailova’s rich, robust and reflective anthology. Nonetheless, their respective treatment by each author in the main avoids the trappings of repetition that often come with the territory of single-film focused scholarship and instead the admittedly numerous overlaps of and between chapters ultimately allow the collection to gain a greater sense of cohesion as it expertly traces elements of Coraline’s creative origins and production histories, its innovations in stop-motion technique and connections to computer-generated imagery, and its gendered politics of representation. Any omissions or absences in one chapter are therefore nicely and satisfyingly solved by the scope and breadth of another. The outcome is a persuasive, engaging and high-quality ‘exploring with’ (p. 11) Coraline that successfully argues for why Selick’s film deserves its place among animation’s modern classics, and how its reflexive depiction of animated labour and images of craft-making make it the ideal subject for an anthology that itself celebrates the legacy of stop motion’s ‘unique flavour of cinematic magic’ (p. 14) and its many gifts of illusion.