Coraline
Henry Selik channels Neil Gaiman channeling a darker, stranger Roald Dahl
I’m beginning to think the English may need to brush up on their parenting skills. First, Roald Dahl wrote all those stories about children under the guardianship of some really awful grownups. Then J.K. Rowling wrote the wildly popular Harry Potter series, which opens with Harry’s abusive aunt and uncle forcing him to live in a tiny room beneath the stairs. Now there’s Neil Gaiman who wrote Coraline, the novel on which the eponymous movie is based, with a plot that once again relies on the tensions between a child’s playtime needs and her parents’ neglect of those needs.
Known for his work with stop-action animation, Henry Selik, also the creative force behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and Dahl’s own James and the Giant Peach, directed the PG-rated film about Coraline Jones (voice by Dakota Fanning), a bored but imaginative little, blue-haired girl who occupies herself by exploring the flat her family just moved into while her parents toil away in front of computer screens. She discovers, not a giant peach growing in the backyard, but rather an enchanted passageway behind a little door in one of the rooms. At the other end of the passageway is a surreal, parallel world that’s a lot like Coraline’s world if it were seen through psychedelic, rose-colored glasses.
There, she meets her Other Mother and Other Father (voices by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman, who also voice Coraline’s real parents), a couple of button-eyed playmates, who are way more interesting and fun than Coraline’s real mother and father. She eats the best roasted chicken she’s ever had in her life and is entertained by the veritable circus carnival that is this other world; a beautiful garden grows in the yard, and magic is always in the air. Yep, it’s a pretty great place, Coraline decides–except for the fact that everyone has expressionless, black buttons for eyes. Oh, and the fact that Coraline will have to sew buttons into her own eyes if she wants to stay. Oh, and the Other Mother plans to force her to stay, regardless of what she wants.
The situation gets much worse before it gets better. Once the façade of the world beyond the magical passageway has faded into the nightmare it really is, Coraline must challenge the Other Mother if she hopes to save, not only herself, but her parents, who’ve been captured and imprisoned by the Other Mother, and the troubled souls of three lost children, who’d also been taken away from their homes. Can she do it? You’ll have to see for yourself. One thing’s for sure, though–Coraline will never misbehave or take those boring parents of hers for granted ever again.
Heck, this film might scare even your own child into behaving properly. (Just kidding, of course. What parent–outside of English parents, perhaps–would want to use fear to manipulate their child.) In all seriousness, though, this film may be marketed as a children’s film, but unless your tot is old enough to, say, actually read the book it’s based on, then I’d suggest something else for the ol’ family movie night. Many of the images are downright disturbing, and the themes may be fodder for nightmares; after all what worse nightmare could there be for small children than one in which their parents are abducted? The very setting of the movie is dark and grim. When it’s not nighttime, the weather is overcast and rainy. It’s more like something out of a scary movie or an Edgar Allan Poe poem, rather than a children’s animated feature.
For those above a certain age, however, Coraline is a unique story told through the highly stylized medium of 3-D stop-action animation. Fans of the stop-action style will want to see the film, and given how fun this one is to watch, they won’t be disappointed. But don’t worry if you don’t get the chance to view the movie in 3-D, because frankly, it adds more to the ticket price than it does to the experience.