Coraline to be made into movie, games

Neil Gaiman’s darkly entertaining children’s book Coraline is going to be made into a stop-motion animation movie by none other than Henry Selick, who was involved in both A Nightmare Before Christmas and James and The Giant Peach.

Putting a Gaiman work on film is exciting enough but there are now plans to also make games based on the novel and movie. D3 Publisher has announced that it will make Coraline games for the Wii, PS2, and the DS and this will be made available by January next year, a month before the movie debuts in America.

This is great news for Gaiman fans, and you can count me as one of ’em.

Directed by Henry Selick, Coraline will be the filmmaker’s first full-length stop-motion animated film since he first established himself with the classic The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. As with James, Selick will be working from the source material of a well-respected scribe. The original novel Coraline was penned by Neil Gaiman, author of the seminal Sandman series of comics as well as Stardust, a novel adapted to the big screen last year.

In the film, a young girl discovers a doorway to a fantastic alternate reality in her house. However, when her alternate world turns sinister, she must marshal her wits to escape the predicament and return home to her old life.

Coraline has not yet been rated and is under development by Papaya Studios (Medal of Honor: Airborne, Larry Boy and the Bad Apple) and Art Co. (Shaun the Sheep, Gunpey for DS).