Clippings

Pic — based on the book by Neil Gaiman, and toplining the voice talent of Dakota Fanning — follows a young girl who walks through a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternate version of her life.

Laika supervising director Henry Selick adapted the tome for the bigscreen and will co-helm with Mike Cachuela.

Selick’s previous directing credits include “James and the Giant Peach” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Pandemonium Films topper Bill Mechanic is producing with Laika’s Mary Sandell.

Alt rockers They Might Be Giants are penning songs for the pic.

“This distribution agreement is an integral step in the evolution of Laika Entertainment as a major force in the global feature film animation marketplace,” said the unit’s prexy and CEO Dale Wahl.

Headed by James Schamus, Focus’ slate already includes Woody Allen’s “Scoop,” Allen Coulter’s “Hollywoodland” and David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises.”

Focus Features will distribute Coraline, the first theatrical release from Knight’s Portland animation studio, Laika Entertainment. The companies plan to announce the deal today at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

The partnership gives Laika a way to put its first movie in theaters and an experienced partner to help market the picture, both essential for the independent studio that Nike founder Knight acquired in 2003. No decision has been made on whether Focus Features will distribute future Laika films

Focus is known for producing offbeat movies that win critical attention but often play to niche markets. Recent pictures include “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Constant Gardener” and “Lost in Translation.” Focus is owned by NBC Universal.

Coraline, now in the early stages of production in Laika’s Northwest Portland offices, is an adaptation of a spooky 2002 children’s novel by Neil Gaiman. Due in theaters in mid-2008, it is the tale of a young girl who wanders into a mirror world, where eerie reflections of her parents seek to imprison her.

The dark, complex nature of the film contrasts with much of the lighter fare in popular animation and makes the project “a little bit of a risk,” said Dale Wahl, a former Nike executive whom Knight hired last year to be Laika’s chief executive. He said Laika picked Focus in part because it has a track record of success with edgy films.

“Focus has shown over the films that they’ve done an ability to handle that risk,” Wahl said.

Focus’ relationship with NBC Universal will also help Coraline get broad distribution, Wahl said, and could eventually steer the film to broadcast and cable networks that NBC owns. Focus will not help finance the film, Wahl said, but will share the marketing costs.

Coraline is being directed by Henry Selick, Laika’s supervising director. Child star Dakota Fanning will voice the title character, and rock duo They Might Be Giants will provide songs for the movie.

After acquiring the former Vinton Studios in 2003, Knight renamed the business Laika and laid out an ambitious plan to build a major animation business in Oregon and finance the movies with the personal fortune he built at Nike. Knight’s son, Travis, works for Laika as an animator and serves on its board.

In addition to Selick, who directed the 1993 animated musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Knight has hired experienced animators and executives from Pixar Animation Studios and elsewhere to help launch his company. Laika plans to blend the stop-motion animation Vinton Studios was known for with newly developed computer effects.

After Coraline, Laika’s next picture is scheduled to be an original work written by Laika animator Jorgen Klubien, tentatively called “Jack & Ben’s Animated Adventure.”

Laika has about 170 employees but expects to hire as many as 400 more animators, software engineers and technical experts in the next two years as film production ramps up. The company is seeking larger facilities in the Portland area to house its growing staff.

Nearly all the major Hollywood studios have animated films in the pipeline, and Disney agreed this year to pay $7.4 billion to buy Pixar. Film critic and animation historian Leonard Maltin said the competition has opened up the animation business to new entrants rather than closed it off.

“Whereas Disney used to have the only brand name in the business, the field is now wide open,” said Maltin, co-author of “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons.”

Viewers now judge animated films on their merits, Maltin said, not on their studio pedigree. And he said Knight has done a good job staffing Laika, which bodes well for quality.

“Henry Selick’s a very talented guy. There’s no reason not to be completely optimistic,” Maltin said.

Speaking Tuesday, in advance of the deal between Laika and Focus, Maltin said marketing an animated film requires a longer campaign than many Hollywood studios are accustomed to.

“Even though the film may not be finished, you have to have a finished trailer out months ahead of time,” Maltin said. “You want to start to build that awareness long before the movie shows up on theater screens.”

That requires juggling the production schedule, Maltin said, sometimes to the filmmakers’ frustration. But it’s vital, he said, especially to a studio starting fresh.

Tall, dark and handsome, he’s recently been hanging out with Angelina Jolie on the set of the film Beowulf, for which he co-wrote the script. Despite all these credentials he is, like most parents, totally embarrassing to his children.

“I’m really looking forward to being a grandparent so I stop embarrassing my kids,” Gaiman says in his tidy English accent.

“My grandparents were never embarrassing, whereas parents can embarrass you just by acknowledging you on the street when your friends were around.”

Even a divine father can be embarrassing. Just ask Fat Charlie Nancy, the protagonist in Gaiman’s latest novel, Anansi Boys, which made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list late last year.

Although his dad is the West Afric
an spider god Anansi – embodied by a hip old black man in yellow gloves and a fedora – the young accountant finds him mortifyingly embarrassing. When Anansi dies at a karaoke night, Fat Charlie learns he has a long-lost brother, Spider, who inherited their father’s supernatural powers.

Soon, the charming brother is on the scene and ruining Fat Charlie’s life. Fat Charlie seeks help from some elderly neighbours who use voodoo from the old country to get rid of the annoying brother. That, of course, is where the real trouble starts.

The Anansi mythology originated in West Africa, but soon spread to Jamaica, the West Indies and the southern states of the US (where Anansi stories are often retold as Brer Rabbit tales).

In Gaiman’s story, patois and Jamaican accents are used to great effect, lending an extra dose of cool to these characters.

Did Gaiman worry about stepping out of his cultural territory and playing around with Afro-Caribbean folklore?

“Absolutely. But if I am only allowed to write stories in which the protagonist and the folklore are those of third-generation English Jews who have gone to live in America, my stories will get very boring very quickly,” he says. “But I am telling the story of my people, in that my people are humanoids living on this planet.” Gaiman did his best to get the Jamaican accents and references right, but his efforts were lost on some readers.

“What fascinated me was the amount of people who assumed that because these women were in Florida, they were little old white ladies and somehow I couldn’t work out a little old white lady accent,” he says.

“People explained that the food I’d described at the funeral was totally wrong and in fact I’d made it sound as though it was a Jamaican funeral. It was strange how it just wouldn’t enter people’s heads that it actually was a Jamaican funeral.”

Anansi Boys is the latest in a string of successes for 45-year old Gaiman. Born in Porchester in southern England, he grew up reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

While working as a journalist in the 1980s – his biography of Duran Duran is something of a collectors item – he collaborated with the fantasy author Terry Pratchett on the apocalyptic comic novel Good Omens. The book spent 17 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list.

Nowadays, Gaiman’s output includes novels, graphic novels, poems and songs. In 2002, American Gods won the Hugo Award for the best fantasy work. But he’s probably best known for his comic series The Sandman, a sophisticated, artistically ambitious work, which garnered a loyal following during its nine years of publication. Ten volumes of the comic are still in print. The series’ hero is Dream, the “immortal anthropomorphic personification of dreams” who also goes by the names, Morpheus, Oneiros, Lord Shaper and the Prince of Stories. Confused? Gaiman himself has summarised the plot as: “The king of dreams learns one must change or die and then makes his decision.”

What is clear is that Gaiman was writing about magic long before Harry Potter made it mainstream. “In the old days, if there was anyone in the signing line over 50 it was somebody’s mum,” he says. Now, he says, there’s more diversity among his fans because more people are reading books in general. “I think that’s because people are storytelling animals and people like stories. One of the things that has got people reading again is the rise of children’s fiction which, through the ’80s and early ’90s, had practically been driven into the ground,” he says. “Most children’s fiction seemed to be rather gloomy and set on council estates and the main character’s brother had problems with heroin, and those were the cheery ones. And they wondered why kids weren’t reading! Then Harry Potter came along, stories where the biggest thing was wanting to know what happened next.”

Despite his growing army of fans, to his kids, Gaiman remains an embarrassing old fart with a bad haircut. At least his two daughters and son can feel relieved that their father has so far resisted his urge to dress like Anansi.

“When I was in New Orleans in ’93, I got to go to the French Quarter, where you run into these little old black guys wearing bright yellow gloves and red fedoras. It seemed natty, it was a sense of style that I in my leather jacket and black jeans could only dream of,” he says.

“I thought, ‘If only I was a 70-year-old black man called Blind Melon Goodbody, I could wear a hat like that’. I mean, they wore spats for God’s sake. Who wears spats?”