My Coraline Box

All over the web, boxes have been surfacing, each containing artifacts from the upcoming stop-motion 3D animated feature, Coraline, based on the book by Neil Gaiman. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that I adore the man and his work. And his voice. And all that. I'll stop now. Sorry.

Anyway, when I started seeing Coraline boxes appearing on blogs of all sorts, I dreamed of getting one, but didn't imagine I really would. And then this arrived in the Knitty mailbox. Dudes, I cried with the happy when I realized what it was.

There are 50 boxes in total. This is box #8.

click to read the letter

Now that you've seen the images, I have to tell you something: most of the tools are not metal, despite what your eyes tell you. I have seen them from millimetres away, and if I didn't touch them, I'd never believe they weren't metal, machined to look so menacing and evil. I don't know what they are made from -- some sort of modelling material -- but they're very light and perfectly sculpted and painted to create the illusion that they clearly have achieved. This is not CGI...this is all work done by hand. Remember that when you watch the movie next February.

I am so honored to have received such a gift and want to thank the team in Portland, Director Henry Selick and Mr Gaiman for the whole fabulous Coraline experience.

Because this Coraline box is so uniquely configured, I am hoping to find a way to mount it safely to the wall [in the Knitty office, of course]. Because having it sit, closed, on a shelf would just be criminal.

You'll find the full set of images in my Flickr stream, captioned, for those as obsessed as I am.