Interview with Coraline micro-knitter Althea Crome

Knit 1 for the Road has a great interview with micro-knitter Althea Crome, who made Coraline's star sweater. Althea almost failed:

they told me about the magical star sweater they needed—it would have to sparkle. I went on a tireless thread quest for about a month—finding everything from stainless steel thread to paintable sparkles and then set about knitting swatches and sending them to Laika. None of them looked right on screen and because of a time issue, it was looking like my hopes of making something for this wonderful project were fading. In fact, at one point, they told me that they were going to have to start shooting soon and would not be able to wait for me to find the right combo of threads.

Read the entire interview here. It's really a wonderful story about the internet enabling people to pursue their interests.

If you haven't already seen it, here's the Coraline video featuring Althea:



*Buy Coraline toys at eBay and Amazon.

Homemade button box (and more)

Donovan Beeson didn't receive a button box from Coraline's Other Mother, so she made one herself. She intends to post a how to at Instructables. In the meantime, here's her Etsy shop.



Macy's is giving away a trip to Cabo San Lucas and $500 worth of "Epic Threads" clothing, which you can see here. (Thanks for the tip, Jory.)



Arevolt.com made a stop motion film of the unboxing of a pair of Coraline Nike Dunks.


And finally, Henry Selick, in an interview with MTV, aptly summarizes the difficulty of promoting Coraline: "Some would say it’s too scary for kids, or it’s not scary enough for adults."

He could also add, "boys won't go because it looks like it's for girls. And girls won't go because there's no dating or princesses." Seriously, if you want Coraline to be a success, you should urge everyone you know to go. This film really needs the fans to promote it.

*Buy Coraline keys at eBay.

Coraline news roundup

Another set of pretty photos of the Coraline Nike Dunks.

1. Sci Fi Channel's blog interviewed Henry Selick. Here's the most interesting bit:

How much do you worry about this quirky, 3-D animated feature, which is not being released by Disney, finding an audience and making money?

Selick: I could spend all my time worrying about that. There are a lot of things competing for people's attention, and it's challenging to get anyone to go into a theater. Neil is a well known writer, but he's not Stephen King. My name will sell a couple of tickets. We hope that we can get some folks in. We're worried that we're not going to get enough people to experience it in the best possible way, which is on the big screen. But we hope that being different—being stop-motion, being scary, being in 3-D, the unique look and design of it—is the thing that attracts people.

Nike/LAIKA connection notwithstanding, kind of a curious strategy to get shoe bloggers to mention Coraline in the hopes that readers looking for photos of shoes will care about the movie.

2. And M.Crowley sent me a photo of a Coraline-inspired scarf:



*Buy "Coraline: A Visual Companion" at Amazon.

Learn about LAIKA; Bobinsky speaks

1. If you're interested in learning about LAIKA (Coraline will be LAIKA's first feature film), try this old article at Wired (pdf).

2. Today Bobinsky mentioned a tweet by Barry Deutsch:



"Did anyone else just receive a super-cool poster-sized comic from Coraline.com in the mail?"

First I'd heard of a poster-sized comic. And I found no further mention at Barry's website.

*Buy Coraline movie posters at eBay.

Lazy mice and an upcoming interview with Neil Gaiman

1. Bobinsky expressed his admiration for these agile mice:



If there was any secret meaning to the video, or the official site of the trainer of the mice, it escaped me. I did happen to find an article about scientists who identified the gene in mice that causes an ordinary laboratory mouse to become unusually lazy.

2. Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones, the author of Coraline: A Visual Companion, will participate in a live chat January 15 at BlogTalkRadio. (If you visit BlogTalkRadio's podcast list, you'll find an interview with Neal Stephenson from September.)

3. "Coraline" has been a surprisingly popular name in England since at least the late 1800s.

*Buy "Coraline: A Visual Companion" at Amazon.

Video interview with Henry Selick

Collider had the chance to visit the Coraline set and interview Henry Selick. His most interesting comment - - they added the character of Wybie so Coraline would have someone to speak to ("so it wasn't just her thoughts"):



You can see some photos from the set here and read more interviews with the crew here.

*Preorder Coraline toys at Entertainment Earth.