Henry Selick's Changes Made Neil Gaiman's Coraline Much Better, Film-Wise

Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella, Coraline, was the perfect source material for a Henry Selick stop-motion film and continues to be one of the most hauntingly memorable classic films the world has seen. Coraline, after all, may be known for its button-for-eyes villain story, but it is also unforgettable when it comes to the children’s chorus score used in producing the film. While Neil Gaiman’s story in the book depicted a cautionary fairy tale picture book for children, Henry Selick enhanced it by making a few changes from book to film adaptation.

While the main theme remains in both versions that there is the ‘real world’ and the ‘other’, one of a few key details was changed in creating the film.

One of them being that the door Coraline would supposedly enter was a regular-sized door in the novella, while the film had it made smaller, fit for children around Coraline’s height, which definitely made it more terrifying and all the more specific visitor that the other mother was longing to attract to her world.

Another is that the novella described Coraline’s family living in flats rather than Selick’s Pink Palace.

Wybie Lovat was not supposed to exist. And yet Selick perhaps added him to the story to make the viewers feel at least a little bit at ease seeing a familiar face once Coraline was transported to the ‘other’ world. The friend who helped Coraline escape the other mother.

Selick’s version is the less dark version of Gaiman’s creation, seeing as the scene how Coraline found her other father was replaced with a lighter method; instead of having to see this ‘something more or less the size and shape of a person’, the other father in film was still intact, with his mouth a little lopsided and his hands being controlled by the piano. While the room was seen to be 'brighter', it actually made the scene more intense, contrasting with what the other father was about to unveil to Coraline.

Nevertheless, both remain to be timeless masterpieces with storytelling executed in a different manner.

Henry Selick’s new film Wendell & Wild is set to be released on Netflix on October 28th.

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