Coraline.
I sent a proposal in May for the international conference, Cinema: Art, Technology, Communication, that will take place in Avanca, Portugal, this month. The energetic Avanca Cinema Club is organising this promising event for the first time. You can find more information here.
This is the abstract of my accepted paper, “Coraline’s Soul: Performance in Stop-motion Animation” that unfortunately I am not presenting because of some previous commitments:
This paper takes Coraline (2009), adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novella, as a case study of performance in stop-motion animation. Recent scholarly work on film performance by Andrew Klevan[1] urges us to pay close attention to films, moment by moment, and to understand postures, gestures, and intonations, not as merely conveying meanings, but as embodying personality. In stop-motion animations we usually do not see the animators; we see moving dolls — and so we have to posit an animating force that instils them with life. It is not by chance that “anima”, the Latin word for soul, is the root of “animation”. Stop-motion employs the technique of shooting successive altered figures to give them the impression of movement. The use of this technique in conjunction with 3D cinematography in Coraline is expressive because of its personal character: the visual depth and attention cues evoke the marvelled and fearful gaze of a child. In this sense, Coraline’s soul is not a spectral entity that commands the actions that she performs. Following Thomas Aquinas,[2] we can say that the soul is the principle of life — it is life, it is how a creature is alive, how it interacts with its surroundings. The soul therefore does not have to do with inwardness or the displacement of the spiritual world, but with outwardness and the inhabitation of the material world. Analysing Caroline’s performance, a performance with Dakota Fanning’s voice but without her body, is thus developing an analysis of how she is and how she acts in the world that the film projects and presents.
_____________________
[1] See Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower, 2005).
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 410-28.
