Miss Forcible and Miss Spink are startled by a tea leaf reading. Their Other World counterparts, like all of Coraline's neighbors, are more grand versions of their "real" selves.

BD: And it helps to shoot in true 3-D.

HS: Yes, because in animation we have the ability to shoot single frames and it's a miniature world, so the issue of if you were using two lenses is pretty much impossible. The interocular distance between the lens is supposed to be in scale with your characters, so we were able to use a little motion control model mover and we would shoot a left-eye frame and then the right-eye frame, and the animator would reposition the puppet and continue shooting left-eye, right-eye and line them up in post. It actually took quite a long time to figure out. We started in real-world interiors, the simplest areas of the film, so we could learn how to work with 3-D. When you shoot in 3-D, there's a certain amount that gets baked in that you really can't change. Basically, how much of the experience there is. How deep gets baked in. And every different lens you use affects that. And then in post you do have the ability to take that baked-in part of the 3-D and move it farther out into the audience or deeper.

BD: Let's talk about the experience of making Coraline at Laika with this particular crew.

Other Father engineers an assist at his piano. 3-D was used to pull the audience into Other World, full of magic.

HS: It's always a challenge to find enough people to do a stop-motion feature. It's not and never will be the dominant form of animation. But about one-third of our crew were veterans, going back to Nightmare Before Christmas and earlier. People I've worked with in some cases 20 years: Bo Henry, Anthony Scott, Eric Leighton. So there was a solid [core] of people that already knew how to communicate with one another. Then there was another third were local artists and animators from Portland, Oregon. There's a long tradition of stop-motion with Will Vinton's company that specialize in claymation. Travis Knight, one of our lead animators, is one of the best animators in the world, in the top five or 10 that I've ever worked with, so he set the bar very high for the local talent. And then one third was international: a lot of Brits, Canadians, Belgians, Germans, New Zealanders.

BD: So how long did it take for the production to jell?

HS: It takes somewhere between half-way through production and two-thirds, to hit the sweet spot where we're all onboard making the same movie. And it's not so difficult to explain why I need a shot.

BD: You previously mentioned that you intentionally instructed everyone to be wary of trying to reach for perfection.

HS: Well, in the past, when Ray Harryhausen was doing his magnificent stop-motion monsters, creatures and effects for films, the attempt was to make it as realistic as possible. People were supposed to believe they were real and they did. But the world changed with Jurassic Park, and then it changed again with Toy Story. And I've done a lot of soul searching over the years. What are the strengths of stop-motion? What should we try to hold on to? There are a lot of strengths: it's touched by the hand of the artist -- you can feel that. You can sense that life force, but it's imperfect. It can't be done perfectly -- that's what CG can do. And I'm trying to get people to embrace that: if it pops, if cloth shifts a little, if the hair is buzzing. It's like this electricity of life.

In the Other World, Wybie and Coraline are drawn to a fantastic circus of trained mice.

BD: And life is full of imperfections and Coraline embraces this.

HS: Well, it's about loving your family with all their warts and flaws.

BD: And what other soul searching have you done about stop-motion and where do you want to go from here?

HS: Again, the question of playing to its strengths and what it can't do well. I felt that it's important to try and keep pushing it in terms of subject matter. A lot of people are concerned that [Coraline] is too scary. I actually think back to the first Disney films that deal with this very effectively: Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Fantasia. It's Alice in Wonderland meets Grimms' fairy tale and I think that it connects to this very long tradition of telling scary tales around the campfire and telling kids not to go out of the cave at night because they're going to be eaten by a saber tooth tiger. So, in one respect, I'm going back to classic storytelling, which is at the heart of Neil Gaiman's book, but this time, the other animators aren't touching this territory, so, for me, it's breaking new ground. So part of my soul searching is taking stop-motion to new places: don't play follow the leader. Look, I understand there's a lot of variety, especially at Pixar, in the stories that are being told, but the tone and feel of those films are very different from what I want to explore.