Behind The Scenery

摘要

On the quiet outskirts of a rainy town way up in the Pacific Northwest, there's a boring beige building in the middle of an even more boring business park. It doesn't look like anything very special could happen here. Outside, cars sit in neat little rows, and nothing at all is visible through the tinted windows. But near the entryway there is the faint, unmistakable whiff of...popcorn. Inside, down a long hallway, a dark space nearly the size of three football fields is broken into "rooms" by heavy black curtains stretching up to the 30-foot-high ceiling. Not so long ago, each of these rooms contained a small, meticulously built stage-a child's fanciful bedroom, an eerie Victorian house, a ghostly chamber behind a magic mirror-all part of a universe coming to life within the anonymous walls. Propped on a chair next to one of the swathed spaces is a sign: "Caution, Magic Occurring Inside." Movie magic, to be exact. This is the set of Coraline, an animated feature film, out next month, based on the fantasy author Neil Gaiman's beautifully creepy children's novel about an adventurous girl who unlocks a secret passageway and enters the parallel Other World, complete with an Other Mother and an Other Father.