Coraline and her parents, two gardening writers, have just moved from Michigan to Oregon to live in the Pink Palace Apartments. After making a “dousing rod” from a tree branch, Coraline goes in search of an underground water well she’s heard is nearby.
While searching, a dislodged stone startles her, and she calls out to the darkness. When she throws the rock back, she almost hits Cat. She discovers that she’s being followed by the grandson of her new landlady, Wybie, and Cat, who doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. Wybie is an inventive boy who talks constantly, and he tells Coraline that he’s surprised his grandma let them move in, because she never rents to people with kids.
In Coraline’s attempt to entertain herself, she finds a child-sized, locked door in their apartment. When her mother unlocks it for her, it opens onto a brick wall. Coraline forgets about the door for the remainder of the day, until a few mice wake her up that night. When she follows, she watches them squeeze under the door, and she notices that there is no longer a dead-end, but a moving, vibrant tunnel.
The tunnel leads to a world, parallel to Coraline’s, only better. In it, she has an Other Mother and Other Father who, unlike her distracted real parents, are both playful and dote on Coraline. Her neighbors in the Other World are fantastical versions of themselves, and even an Other Wybie is there, but this version can’t speak. The only thing that Coraline finds disturbing is that everyone has buttons for eyes.
She also meets Cat in the Other World, who can speak. He warns Coraline that while she might believe this world is a dream come true, nothing is as it seems. Throughout her journey, Cat acts like a guide for Coraline, telling her the truth about things in the Other World.
When the Other Mother tells Coraline she can stay with them forever if she replaces her eyes with buttons, Coraline finally decides she prefers her boring, ordinary world. Only The Other Mother has decided that she wants to keep her, so she kidnaps Coraline’s parents to lure her back to the Other World.
Coraline is a stunning, surreal feast for the eyes, and 3-D brings everything into a dreamlike state. Selick took Gaiman’s book and magnified everything, the viewer can almost touch and taste the chicken dinner, the flowers, or Cat. Selick had to fight to get the studios to agree to stop-motion animation, which he talked to www.MoviesOnline.com’s Sheila Roberts about in an interview.
“It has not always been easy to get people to fund a stop-motion feature when you look at the huge success, and deservedly so, of the Pixar films and some of the Dreamworks pictures,” Selick said. “But if you look at the huge success of The Nightmare Before Christmas, it may not have been as big when it first came out, but it lives on and on and on and it fuels merchandise like nobody’s business.”
Selick felt that the only way to make Coraline was by using 3-D. “It will capture the stop-motion more effectively and underline the fact that stuff is real, it really exists,” he told Roberts. “Then I could use it to draw the viewers into the Other World as Coraline is drawn into the Other World by the powers of the Other Mother.”
Coraline may frighten some children, but the overall message is powerful - any ordinary child can defeat extraordinary evil.
Coraline
Run time: 100 minutes
Directed by: Henry Selick
Written by: Neil Gaiman (novel), Henry Selick (screenplay)
Voiced by: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher
 |
 |
