A closer look
Stop-motion animation is essentially an exercise in profound, slow-motion masochism. To abandon the old technique of painstakingly molding clay frame-by-frame, the animators behind Coraline utilized rapid prototyping 3D printers to mass-produce the physical puppet heads. They printed an upper half (eyes and brows) and a lower half (mouth and jaw) that snapped onto the puppet skull with magnets. By mathematically mixing and matching the top and bottom halves between frames, a single physical puppet could miraculously generate exactly 207,336 completely unique facial expressions.
