Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with modern 3-D. Here lead animator Travis Knight checks the framing on Coraline. Photo credit: Kelvin Jones. All images © Focus Features.

In Neil Gaiman's popular 2002 novella Coraline, a young girl discovers a hidden passageway in an old house to a strange and opposite "other" world -- an experience not unlike visiting the "set" of the animated movie that will bring the book to the big screen.

Produced by Oregon-based Laika Ent., Coraline is an unusual movie in several respects. Bucking the CG toon trend, Coraline combines old-fashioned stop-motion animation techniques with the newfangled wonders of modern 3-D. All this under the direction of Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, and filming in a surprisingly nondescript industrial park office complex just outside the lush green environs of Portland.

At the time of the set visit in late May, Selick says the film is two-thirds complete after about a year and a half of production, which followed a year of pre-production. The schedule for finishing the film is tight -- set to wrap in late summer or early autumn, the film is slated for a late-December Oscar-qualifying run, followed by a nationwide release on Feb. 6 from Focus Features.

Selick says the long process of making the film began in 2000, before Gaiman's popular novella had been published. At that time he managed to convince first the author and then producer Bill Mechanic that animation struck the right tone for the creepy kids tale. "This is a scary book for kids. If it's animation, I think that it takes a little of the edge off the worst moments, but it keeps the Grimm's fairy tale quality," he says.

There are changes in Selick's adaptation, although the story remains essentially the same: A girl named Coraline discovers a passageway to a world much like our own that nonetheless seems better in many ways -- until her "Other Mother" kidnaps her real parents and demands that Coraline stay. But it's now set in Oregon as opposed to the Midwest, and Selick has added a local boy named Wylie to the cast, a move he says helps by giving Coraline someone to talk to. Another character, Mr. Bobo, has been made more energetic and given a Russian accent in his transition to Mr. Bobinsky.

Heading up the cast is Dakota Fanning as Coraline, with Teri Hatcher as Mother and Other Mother, Jon Hodgman as Father and Other Father, Keith David as The Cat, Ian McShane as Bobinsky, and the English comedy duo of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as the theatrically minded neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.

Work proceeds at a steady pace at the massive Laika facility as craftsmen make the film one frame at a time. Animator Chris Tootell readies Coraline to cross a snowy forest. Photo credit: Galvin Collins.

Production is in full swing at this point, and there are more than 28 animators working at any one time on rehearsing or shooting scenes for the film and producing 90-100 seconds of finished animation each week. Work proceeds at a steady pace throughout the massive Laika facility as craftsmen prepare from scratch all the puppets, costumes, sets and props needed to make the film one frame at a time.

Creating the necessary elements takes unusual talent and lots of time. The costume department, headed up by Deborah Cook, is chock full of tiny clothes all made by hand to exacting standards. Because of wear and tear, each costume is made in multiples. Cook shows a pair of tiny pajamas worn by Coraline in the film, of which 30 identical pairs were made. Each copy had to be identical down to the way the pattern broke at the seams.

Georgina Hayns, who has the unique title of puppet fabrication supervisor, says making such clothes in quantity requires highly specialized talent. "We've actually got a miniature knitter, who is actually part of the guild of craftspeople in the United States, and we found her on the Internet," she says. Even with such talent, clothing these puppets is also a game of patience -- it takes about three weeks to make a simple sweater.

Next to costume design is a larger room devoted to puppet fabrication. As with costumes, multiple puppets are made for the main characters and there are 28 Coraline puppets. Each puppet also has multiple pairs of backup hands, which are especially prone to wear and tear and often need to be replaced, Hayns says.

Puppets begin with an armature designed to give them a full range of motion. They are made mostly of ball-and-socket joints manufactured by a company in San Francisco. Each puppet also has two heads, each with a different base expression to give animators a greater potential range of facial expressions.

"We try to get as much into these mechanical heads as we possibly can, but without distorting the face so much," says Hayns. "Because if you're not careful, you can over-animate these. We try to get the subtlety of movement in there as much as possible."