Coraline, Coraline Head

original movie prop

An adventurous girl finds another world that is a strangely idealized version of her frustrating home, but it has sinister secrets. Voiced by Dakota Fanning, Coraline Jones is brave, clever, curious 11-year-old girl with dark blue hair and annoyed by not being taken seriously by (in her opinion) crazy adults, people constantly mistaking her name for Caroline, and her mundane and bland life. Neil Gaiman the original author of the 2002 novel describes her as “full of vim and spunk” and all those wonderful old-fashioned words. From the 2009 Laika film Coraline, this Coraline head used on various puppets throughout filming has magnets in the face allowing the animators to switch out faces depending on the scene(s) showing the characters numerous facial expressions. The face being in two pieces allowed the mouth and brow sections to be changed as needed while the line seen across the nose would be removed by computer during post-production.