Neil Gaimans Coraline. And the great media wall.

Posted by Blackett on Sep 13, 2008 in Animation, Books, Features, Film | View Comments

I am currently on a little bit of a Neil Gaiman bender and attempting to soak up all of his work befor I get sick of him. The next tale on my pile is his book Coraline which handily enough is due to hit cinema screens in March 2009, but trying to find a video or any information is like pulling our pubic hair with my teeth, fruitless  and time consuming.

This was going to be a review of the book with my hopes and dreams for the on coming film but as the book is awesome, scary and worth reading and I want the film to be awesome, scary and worth watching I thought it would make for a rather dull read.

But then the issue of youtube and videos being removed reared its ugly head and this got me thinking. I really don’t understand those in the media industry that want to fight youtube. The good ol BBC have created a perfect environment with in youtube, allowing users access to all kinds of video, even going so far to edit videos specfically for youtube as they know the online community would find a way to do it any way. And it has led to alot of happy customers and not prolific copyright infringement. Even George Lucas who is know for being prescious about the Star Wars series gave his concent for users to re edit ‘The Phantom Menace’ in any way they wished and publish it just as long as they didn’t make money from what they made.

Then you have Viacom demanding a billion dollars from youtube and wonderul forward thinking NBC trying to create a closed garden first of all by pulling all videos from youtube and then from itunes, and this is one of the reasons it is so painfully difficult to find anything about Coraline. I realise you can get videos from Hulu but its a mission and a half to set up a website so it will accept the video. I just think that its foolish for these companies to be missing out on what is essentially free advertising. But its good to see NBC are seeing the errors of their ways and at the recent Apple conference it was announced that NBC will be coming back to the Itunes Store.