Interview: How LAIKA Turned ‘Coraline’ 15-Year Anniversary Into Love Letter To Fans

Laika's 2009 stop motion hit Coraline is enjoying a terrific $52 million box office re-release of its beautifully remastered 3D fantasy film. I sat down with Laika CMO David Burke for an in-depth discussion about how Laika turned Coraline's 15-year anniversary into a love letter to the fans — and this interview itself turned out to be a sort of love letter to both the film and its fans as well.

Coraline was written and directed by the absolutely brilliant Henry Selick (whose 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas probably contributed a great deal to the modern popularity and revival of stop motion animated films), adapting the story by author Neil Gaiman (who also wrote The Sandman comic series that was adapted into a hit Neflix series of the same name).

Coraline's popularity has remained strong over the many years, with multiple re-releases and all manner of tie-ins for fans to participate and feel that sense of community together. Fans grew up, saw the film from different perspectives, and brought in new fans — whether their friends, family, or their own kids as they grew up and introduced new generations of fans to the film.

Laika, the stop-animation film studio behind hits Corpse Bride, ParaNorman, Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and of course Coraline, was founded in 2005 in Portland, Oregon. And since then, they have yet to make a bad film — they've yet to make anything less than a very good or great film, in fact.

I've written about Laika, and my love of both stop motion and Laika's films, in the past — including coverage of their Academy Awards for technical achievements , and my glowing review of Kubo and the Two Strings .

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I'm also a lifelong fan of stop motion in general, which was a common form of visual effects and animation when I was growing up. If you've not seen the tremendous making-of documentary series about Star Wars on Disney+, I highly recommend it, and particularly for all of the footage and discussion about building and working with so many stop motion effects and creatures in the original trilogy.

I became a big Laika fan with the 2016 release Kubo and the Two Strings, which blew my mind and instantly made my list of the greatest animated films of all time. Kubo was my pick for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, so I was thrilled it not only got nominated but also received an unexpected nod for Best Visual effects as well.

But I hadn't seen Coraline in a long while, having only seen it once with family and a room full of kids. I appreciated it at the time, although like many I didn't actually realize it was all entirely stop motion, and watching at home with several kids in the room doesn't always allow an adult uncle to focus on appreciating the film as much as helping babysit.

Review: 'Kubo And The Two Strings' Is A Mesmerizing, Emotional Animated Film

So I didn't see Coraline again until last week, when I finally got to see the remastered version. And if it was already gorgeous and brilliant, this remastering is incredible and has opened up a whole new avenue to appreciate the film — and, in theaters, to see it in awe-inspiring 3D the way it was filmed and intended to be experienced for a fuller immersion.

Skeptics of 3D, hear me out — if you haven't cared much for 3D overall, I'll just say Coraline in 3D is on par with the quality and value of seeing Avatar in 3D. That's how much it lives up to the promise of what 3D can deliver at its best.

Audiences certainly agree, to the tune of $52.3 million and counting, as Coraline enjoys one of the highest grossing re-releases of all time. It's a testament to the power of the fans, but I think it is equally a true testament to the power of a studio knowing its audience as personally as Laika does, and knowing what those fans want and how to engage them.

(One of my personal favorites is the Piano Push Play company's tie-in with Coraline — this company saves old pianos and lets artists fix them up for public display around Portland, and they set up one based on Other Father's piano from the film .

All studios have fans they try to engage with, and it's always obvious to me which studios don't really understand their own fans and have not figured out how to engage those fan. But Laika clearly has, and Coraline proves that perfectly.

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Now, without further ado, let's take that deep dive into Coraline, Laika, and the fans who made the 15th anniversary such a success...

MARK HUGHES: Coraline is celebrating its 15th anniversary. I'm glad it's having this huge revival, it's very well deserved. And it got another re-release, and has grossed $52 million so far—

DAVID BURKE: $52 million and counting! So we still have some territories yet to release. And, you know, it's still doing kind of decent numbers.

MH: Yeah. It's still in the theaters here. And I know it ended once until the 4th. So it's a second extension in theaters now... and I know y'all must be thrilled, I know a lot of work went into really energizing around this, which we'll get into.

But just in terms of your expectation, talking about the big thing, the release. It's had three releases before, right? The previous three years. And I think it did like $7 million last year?

DB: Yeah, it did. And it was initially there for two days. And then we brought it back into theaters for a number of days.

And, you know, if you're asking what were we forecasting and what were we thinking? I mean, we were very aware of the strength of the fan base for both Leica Studios and for Coraline. And that really kind of manifested on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, where there was a real, you know, demand for more content that was related to Coraline.

Actually many of our films, you know, from a behind the scenes perspective — just particularly for Coraline, which I thought was interesting — was there was a lot of conspiracy, fan conspiracy theories about the movie and how new audiences were discovering it and were speculating, you know, about different aspects of the storyline.

And I think that sort of community that we had kind of created to our platform alongside these kind of trends that were emerging really just, you know, suggested that there was a really strong demand for people to have the collective experience of watching this on the big screen with like minded fans as well.

So going into like 2024, we were planning, you know, the 15th anniversary re-release. We were bringing it back in remastered 3D. And really it was intended as a sort of kind of love letter to the fans. It was, you know, this is an opportunity for you all to kind of get into the theatre where this film was designed to be experienced and, you know, have that experience together.

And we forecasted exponential kind of growth, but it did surpass our expectations.

But I do want to say, Mark, that our numbers were pretty bullish. You know, we did have a pretty strong sense that there was going to be a demand for it. And we planned it as such because we had kind of a multi-tiered campaign and we had a new poster, a new trailer. We had some footage that we pulled out of the archives that we dropped for fans.

So there was a real kind of thoughtful, intentional kind of strategy designed, you know, to kind of mobilize this interest and build up anticipation for the August re-release. That kind of started off in February when we dropped the first teaser trailer.

And the teaser trailer, which was, I don't know if you saw it, but it was this very cool kind of abstract interpretation of the Coraline character. And it was like buttons and the other mother's kind of hand coming in out of the frame. But, you know, there's very few films that you can do that with, that you can just take a sort of abstract interpretation of character design and immediately put it onto a poster and you know what it is.

I think the results on that were extraordinary. I think we had like 41 million organic views of that poster when we dropped it. Which was just phenomenal, you know, and people were just so excited by it.

MH: Something that you really tapped into, that hasn't been properly appreciated... [is that] people are kind of starting to come around to realizing animation has been doing heavy lifting the last two years at the box office. It's been a tough two years at the box office, and audiences are responding to animation.

I think animation has— it falls in that really prime area, especially a film like Coraline that has so much to say to adults and to children... I think Inside Out 2 did the same kind of thing, but I think not as directly or as deep a level as Coraline. When animation is so powerful at the box office, and you've got people connecting at so many various levels — because we all have baggage, we all have childhood, we're all adults.

And there's the fact that nothing else looks like this film. I mean, Coraline is so particularly unique. You've got a 3D release that is— it looks gorgeous, especially the new remastered version—

DB: I mean, the film was conceptualized in 3D, you know, so 3D is used or deployed in the story to really add to the story and further the narrative. And it feels very, you know, kind of authentic, I suppose.

But to your point about the audience embracing Coraline, I think it really just speaks to the emotionally resonant kind of storytelling that Laika is all about, right? I mean, we've made no secret about the idea that we're committed to original storytelling, but I think original storytelling in stop motion has allowed them to be timeless, right?

So, you know, even though you might respond to the film differently to when you saw it 15 years ago for different reasons, you can't argue that it doesn't look as good today as it did 15 years ago. I think that really speaks to the fact that these are real objects and real characters in camera.

And they exist after the production process, you know. We have an archive here in Portland where we house all of our puppets and our sets and our props and various kind of film paraphernalia. And they are enduring kind of tangible things that you can touch. I think that further aids the kind of resonance, right?

So you see this movie when you're younger, it stays with you for whatever reason. We all have our own subjective response to when we first see a piece of art, and then you go back to it, but you see it maybe through a different lens because you've got older, or you've lived life a little bit. But what you can't argue with is that it's still incredibly beautiful and still very distinct and very much of the now.

And I think that really is stop motion generally, in terms of the way that Laika approaches kind of stop motion.

MH: Yes. Having watched this film before and just talking to people about it, it's always interesting how many people think that it's CGI — or think it's a mix, that you used the figures and then they mixed it with CGI or went back and they touched it up with CGI.

And I'm like, "No! I've seen the—" When Kubo came out, I got to see some of the various examples of all the different faces, and I saw that and trying to explain to people that this is all being done this way.

I mean, the only extent to which machines are doing anything is the ones that, there's some of the automation for some of the puppets that's too complicated for people's hands—

DB: Right. Yeah, that's it. That's all that's there.

I mean, that's an interesting kind of conundrum, I suppose, when we talk about our films and when we think about how to kind of broaden the audience, and really just get as many people as possible to embrace them. We really kind of land on the idea of evangelizing stop motion and our process.

Over the last number of years, you know, on the platforms that I've mentioned, we've really just started to showcase our process in a way that's seeming to really kind of land for people because, you know, you're right. I think that there is a lot of misconception or misunderstanding out there around our our style of filmmaking, which is stop motion and has elements of technology.

So it's a sort of hybrid kind of approach and being so good at that, then people can't tell the difference between what is, you know, a tangible real kind of element, and what is where some technology has been used.

We've been really fortunate over the last couple of years to take advantage of platforms like TikTok, Reels and YouTube that have allowed us to invite our fans in to say, "Okay, you love this movie or you love this scene or you love this character. This is how we did it."

And having that sort of split screen approach, or pulling footage from our archives that we're able to showcase via a time lapse, or in putting a spotlight on a specific kind of discipline within the kind of production studio, I think has really helped.

I think there's so much more people know now about our type of filmmaking than maybe they did 15 years ago, because we have really invested in evangelizing the art form via our social channels, but also through our live exhibits and exhibitions. We've just closed an exhibition in the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, which ran for 18 months and had, I think, several hundred thousand people visit. It was an incredible success.

And again, that's a sort of evangelizing moment for stop motion and for our type of film to have that amount of people come through the door, you know, immerse themselves in our style of filmmaking.

You know, they understand, you know, they may have seen the films or they mightn't have seen the films, but every, you know, every, I suppose, section of that exhibition really focused on not just each of our films, but also on different aspects of the production kind of process.

And we've just opened one in the British Film Institute in London, which is Leica frame by frame, which allowed us to take, you know, a key frame from each of our films and spotlight specific aspects of the stop motion process as Laika does it. I mean, it's such a beautiful, rewarding, rich and immersive kind of exhibit. And I think — it was a free ticketed event or free ticketed exhibition — according to BFI, their most successful exhibition of their kind of history.

It's those sorts of things, like you have to make very intentional choices about how you grow your audience. And Coraline, you know, it was an enormous success this year, but I would be remiss if I said that it was accidental. Yes, the number was a big number, but, you know, the work that we were doing for the last several years was really about, how do we grow the audience for stop motion? How do we challenge that perception that stop motion is a kind of niche art form, or that there isn't an audience for stop motion?

Actually, there is an enormous audience for stop motion. It's just that what we haven't done before at any great scale is really lean into, "This is how we make these stories." And this is why these stories are as resonant and timeless today as they were when they were first released, because they're real objects, real characters shot in camera.

And, you know, you can see them in an exhibition or you can see them, you know, in Laika's archives. I think there's just there's a deeper appreciation for that now, that people are very passionate about Laika and our style of filmmaking.

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MH: Yes, and getting repeatedly nominated for Academy Awards also helped in terms of audience awareness, and people's awareness that Kubo and the Two Strings got a nomination in visual effects as well, I think this awareness is happening within the fandom, and then the cinephiles and the industry, and then that's getting it into the mass media, which then as soon as people [are] more aware of it, if there's more access, they're obviously immediately interested in this and have that appreciation.

DB: It's just, as you say, it's a case of showing them. It's a case of giving them the option, putting it in front of them, which is what for the 15th anniversary Coraline put in front of them — and people chose it. It was getting in the top five and top 10 in the domestic box office on some weekends.

So as part of our re-release, we commissioned a piece that was Revisiting Coraline, where what we did was we brought together some of the artists that had worked on it, who had worked on the Coraline puppet, and we tasked them with the responsibility of recreating the Coraline puppet, utilizing some of our methods that we deploy at the studio currently. It really shows how Laika has evolved its process and we've taken this enormous leap forward in terms of what we can do from a scalability perspective.

Currently we're working on Wildwood, which is actually a real full circle moment for the studio because it's a return to Portland, or it's a return rather to an Oregon setting. It's another female protagonist and really it's what our director describes as a love letter to Portland.

I think that the scale of this film is extraordinary, the Wildwood movie. It's multiple sets, multiple characters. It's a very significant kind of production. I don't think we would have been able to make that movie 10 years ago because on every movie, Mark, we've kind of evolved our process.

Each movie has had a different kind of challenge associated with it, and each time the team here have kind of risen to that challenge and got us to a point where you just think you can't go beyond and you do. But Coraline started it all.

And just to tie that up in a nice bow for you when I was talking about Wildwood, we made a decision to actually release or drop the Wildwood title reveal as part of the re-release. So people who are going to see Coraline, you can see what's the first look or teaser at Wildwood that opens up just before the film. Then, at the end of the feature, we have this piece [Recreating Coraline] that we produced in-house, which brought all of the team back together to work on some new Coraline puppets.

And it's super fun, it's a super nice piece, but you can see them and you can see it anywhere I think that it's currently playing. ...

There's a beautiful kind of like 4K Steelbook that we've done [last year]. ... And I think what's been really interesting about this, Mark, which is worth kind of noting is that not only did Coraline perform in theaters in the month past, it's also done extraordinarily well on transactional VOD and on physical media.

I think it was, you know, at one point the number one physical Blu-ray on Amazon, and had done a very significant amount of transactional business on both streaming platforms, which really speaks to the power of the fan community for Laika Studios and for Coraline, but also speaks to [the fact] there is a desire across multiple kinds of audiences to access content whenever they feel like they want to see it.

MH: We haven't had really a chance to talk about some of the specifics of that fan engagement this time, and how much you've done. and the various ways that you've reached out with social media and with some different merchandising and with pairing or partnering with companies and mentioning the Blu-ray.

That's one of the things I was wondering, is... what sort of numbers [were done] on the merchandising and that outreach, like how much is that generating, not just monetarily but in terms of the buzz around the movie and all that?

DB: What I can tell you is that, you know, we do have an e-commerce platform, which is the Laika Store, which we launched in October of 2023. So within the last year. And what we've taken is a sort of curatorial kind of bespoke mindset to the products that we stock there.

They're exclusively available on Laika and the Laika Store, and we do limited runs and we cover all of our films, but we also do studio branded products as well.

But what's fascinating for me is as it relates to Coraline, what we saw was, I think one of the first product drops we did was the Coraline plush cat, and our first run of them — which were in the thousands — sold out within the first, I want to say, like 48 hours or 24 hours. It was super quick.

And we're now, I think, running a 15,000 person or name waiting list, and we've had like two or three drops since. So that's been really interesting.

So when we've done the Coraline drop, like various kind of exclusive limited edition products, they sell out super quickly and we're still currently operating a waiting list. Again, that kind of speaks to, I think, the demand, right? And then our consumer products licensing program is kind of gaining ground all the time. I think we've seen a really significant amount of growth over the last four or five years, and it's just kind of getting bigger and bigger.

I know that for Hot Topic, for instance, which is one of our key kind of retail partners, we were the number one brand in Hot Topic in August — again, which kind of speaks to demand. It takes a little bit of time to see numbers, you know what I mean? Because it needs to be aggregated up and it needs to be passed through.

But we've certainly seen kind of exponential growth on our licensing programs, and we've seen significant demand on our own store. What we're excited at, then, we've done kind of partnerships with a number of partnerships.

We did a Converse partnership which is about to drop in November, but we had done a partnership last year that was cross studio, where each of our films were kind of celebrated through [Converse's] Design by You platform, which allowed fans to go in and design their own Converse or Chuck Taylor and pull in different designs that were made available for each film.

That surpassed their expectations. And what we heard from Converse was that, when they dropped the Instagram image of the promotion, it was their second-most liked organic post of all time. So again, that was from last year [and], there were those kind of indicators that suggested this fan base were really, really engaged and very passionate.

Then I want to say that we did, again, celebrate our place in Portland. We've done partnerships with Stumptown, which is a Portland-based kind of coffee company here, and they've just had enormous success on their Coraline cold brew. But, you know, they're on I think their second restock of merchandise, and they've seen significant engagement online.

So, it's taken a little bit of time to get those exact numbers, but anecdotally, it's all kind of pointing to partners that are very, very happy. And in many cases we've surpassed expectations, and it certainly kind of points to a very healthy future demand for other Laika films to be re-released.

But I tell you, [regarding the upcoming Laika partnership with Converse in November] we're submitting an order internally because everyone's kind of like, because we have our own in-house team of designers and creatives who have, you know, supported and consulted on the design process. So they all have their own particular favorites that they're very excited about.

MH: Yeah, as soon as you were talking about people being able to do their own, I was like, if I had the opportunity to make a pair of Converse that had one shoe Kubo and one shoe Coraline, I would have done that in a heartbeat.

One last question I wanted to ask — when did you first start talking about this 15th anniversary, like, "We're going to throw a big birthday bash," essentially?

DB: We started doing that, I want to say like four years ago. One of the challenges that we have, Mark, is that it takes so long to make our movies, right? And the challenge that was laid out for me when I joined Leica was, how do we keep our fan base? How do we keep our fans engaged in between the production cycles, right? And I think that was the challenge.

There was multiple ways that we approached that, one of which was establishing a social media content strategy, which allowed us to connect directly with our fans and share with them new content and kind of sneak peeks, and BTS and everything else.

And then it was thinking about consumer products. And then it was thinking about our events and exhibitions. And then it was thinking about our publishing strategy, as well as our gaming strategy. So really, thinking about multiple touch points for the fans that would kind of keep them excited and keep them engaged, you know, as I said, in between each film.

And when we were looking at Coraline's 15th, that felt like a natural opportunity not just to celebrate Laika, but really kind of give something— not just celebrate Coraline, but also to give something to the fans, and message our preview a little bit about Wildwood.

So, because it was three or four years in the planning, because you've got this significant production happening, you're aiming to have some material from that movie to share in and around the anniversary. So we kind of knew a couple of years ago, this is what we wanted to do.

And really what, as we were working over the years, is like recognizing early that the fans want to see these films, to see Coraline on the big screen, and they want to see it with other fans. So it was about like giving them the opportunity to do that.

And that started three years ago, and then seeing the kind of year on year growth, and then kind of coming into the 15th anniversaries.

MH: That's great. Because there's a lot of moving parts, as you pointed out — no pun intended. But you have— meticulously over that three year period that you were setting things up, you knew what the numbers were, you were watching your merchandising numbers, you saw engagements.

[It reminds me of the 1979 sci-fi horror film] Alien re-released earlier this year, not at the level that you've had, but Alien had its re-release for the anniversary, the 45th anniversary... and I think it made it into the top 10 of the box office on the weekend that it re-released [note: Alien opened in the domestic weekend top 11 in its 2024 re-release, despite being in the domestic daily top 10 on Friday, on Saturday, and on Sunday]...

And this was another one, Coraline, I thought, I was looking at maybe $10 million that it could do, because I was thinking entirely like, animation, people want animation and this connects. It's going to do, it's going to beat those expectations, but not this much.

DB: It just speaks to the power of fans and, you know, the desire to have collective experiences with other fans and have collective celebratory experiences.

I think that that's the reality, that it's one thing to watch a movie at home, and, you know, you're watching it with your family or you're watching it on your own. But to be able to go into a theater and watch it with a couple of hundred fans who are as passionate about this studio and this film as you are, it's super fun, right?

And it's an in-person thing. I mean, I do want to point out that next year is Laika's 20th anniversary and we have very much been working towards that as well. We've got like a lot of really exciting initiatives that have been percolating over the last number of years, and they're going to begin to kind of reveal themselves over the next 12 months, or 18 months rather. And we're super excited about that.

So it's all part of the bigger mission, which is really to get as many people as possible to see our movies and love and celebrate stop motion as much as we do. That's the goal.

My thanks to Laika and David Burke for taking the time to do this extended interview, and to provide me with inside details and information about Coraline and Laika's planning and marketing.