At the LA press day for Focus Features' Coraline Hatcher revealed that she actually felt she was voicing not two, but three characters. "I think of it as three. There’s the real mother, the other mother, and the evil mother. Henry actually calls it four. Anyway, it is my first animated movie. I’ve always wanted to be in an animated movie, but I never dreamed that I would be in this level of artistry. I've always been a huge fan of Henry’s and Neil Gaiman. And then, on top of it all, I got to play these three different levels of people," said Hatcher.
Hatcher admits her first experience in voice work was different from what she anticipated. "I think when you go in to do your first animated movie, you imagine you're going to pull out every accent you’ve ever worked on as a child and every silly voice you ever imagined making up. And Henry had such a beautiful, imaginative, visual thing happening in his mind as to how the look of the movie was going to be, that he really wanted the voices behind it to be seamlessly real," explained Hatcher. "So it ended up, in a way, being similar to what you would do with any acting job — that you would try to find the sort of motivations, the needs, the desires, the situation of who these three people were and what they wanted and what they needed. And then sort of distill it all down into your voice."
Although her actions in the recording booth aren't seen on the screen, Hatcher says she held herself differently depending on which character she was voicing. "Physically, I think for the real mom, I had a sort of posture. Everyone thinks, 'Oh you work in an animated movie and you just get to wear jeans and wear your hair in a ponytail,' which is true and not bad. But for me, I still kind of put my hair up in a frumpy-feeling way and sort of stood frumpier, so that I felt heavy and exhausted to find that voice. And then the Other Mother was much more postured and mannered, so there was still physicality to it although you know you’re not in front of a live camera."
And speaking of being in front of a live camera, Hatcher doesn't think there are many similarities between her character Susan on Desperate Housewives and either Mother or Other Mother in Coraline. And playing one of the ladies of Wisteria Lane with all its insanity didn't help her get into the craziness of Other Mother. "I think they’re completely disconnected. I think it’s easy marketing-wise to make some connection, but I think they’re very different. I don’t think I hear any Teri in the movie, and I don’t think I hear Susan either, which I’m really happy about," said Hatcher.
"I don’t think they’re similar to the characters on the show. I think the most relatable character in life, and certainly in our economy right now and our society, we have a lot of working families, working mothers, that are just exhausted and trying to do it all and are so burdened with worry and that makes you regretful, really, of your children, but not in a mean way - more in the way of survival. You can only accomplish so much, so you’ve got a lot of parents just running on empty and not able to be consciously and mindfully parenting the way they might like to. I think that’s a really relatable thing, and I think on its deepest level, the movie thematically shows us that children can be lured away into something that is enticing and seems like it’s going to be better and seems like it’s going to be the answer to everything and ends up ultimately being very dangerous, if not entrapping. And what I love about the ending is that we really see Coraline embrace the imperfections in her parents and understand that that love is enough. And I think that’s a really great message for the world right now, because certainly nobody is perfect."
Hatcher was a fan of Neil Gaiman's going in, but had never read Coraline before taking on the job of helping to bring Gaiman's book to life. "I had read American Gods so I was familiar with Neil as a writer, but I hadn’t read it. I read it afterward, so I know that they’re different and so in a way that wasn’t a bad thing because I think what’s great is that Henry, and Neil, obviously, really there was some great synergy in bringing this vision and so much effort to life, so I was really directed by Henry and his vision."
"What was so fascinating from my end was that I didn’t see anything till I saw the whole movie finished," revealed Hatcher. "I saw a couple of sketches and I did get to go to the animation studios up in Oregon and see that, but I never saw my voice being a part of telling a story until I saw the whole movie finished. So it was really his genius that kind of envisioned all of our voices telling the story and how he was going to put that together with the images."
Since she didn't see the animation while she was working on the film, the animators matched the characters' movements to Hatcher's voice and not the other way around. "Which is why I think Henry, why it was so important to him to get the expressions he wanted - that the voice work in a way does come first and inspires the animators," offered Hatcher. "And then over a couple of years it starts to go back and forth. You may get, 'This line seems like we need something something. Could you do something something?' Initially it’s just you giving them something off point. And I was told by one of the producers that most of my lines are from the very first recording session we did."
Page 2: Coraline's a Family Affair
