Alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, was hired to record the soundtrack for the massive stop-motion film, “Coraline,” but in light of creative differences with the producers ended up with only one song in the final cut. “Coraline” is a stop-motion animated film based on Neil Gaiman’s award-winning book. It follows a young girl who discovers a portal in her home which leads to a hostile alternate universe.
TMBG was originally hired to record an entire soundtrack for the film, but early in production they failed to find a rapport with the creative team and according to TMBG’s John Flansburg “were basically cut out of the film.” He went on to elaborate on the experience, “It was a strange experience. They basically wanted the music to be more creepy. It was unfortunate–we did a lot of sort of preliminary work, there were a lot of false starts, and we never really found a rhythm to work with them. I guess there’s one of our songs in the movie momentarily, but it’s sort of unfortunate.”
However, the band and the studio have apparently patched things up and the original piano ditty called “Other Father Song,” is still in the film, and the duo is planning on releasing the rest of the unused material in an later album, as they did with “Careful What You Pack,” which was created during the “Coraline” session and was released on The Else.
Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”) is directing “Coraline,” which is slated for a February 6th release date.