Coraline Review

I can only hope Henry Selick continues to make stop-motion animated films for the rest of his career. In a time where everything is or perhaps has to be CG, seeing something like this adds something to the overall film. Characters are three-dimensional; a real treat outside of 3-D modeling in the CG animated fare. Hand-crafted pieces of fine art, each character is beautifully designed and structured. Yes, I’m gushing, because I’m happy that there’s something outside of the short film world that is fully stop-motion animated. But truth be told, it doesn’t matter the medium necessarily because no matter how you use the medium of choice, it all comes down to story.  Coraline is a great film, shades below a timeless masterpiece that Nightmare Before Christmas is, but I’ll take a great film over anything, any day of the week.

The story is a clever mixing of the fantastical and the real, as Caroline is a frustrated little girl, who her parents ignore her for their work, so naturally her imagination runs wild. Being displaced from her friends in Michigan, for a big empty house in a drab, dreary Oregon, there is little she can actually do. With a new, annoying friend for her, he hands her a doll his grandma has that is strikingly similar to her. The doll is the bait and hook for Caroline to enter this other world that has better cooking, better parents, and is more colorful.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the juxtaposition between the two worlds is fun and as inventive as any animated film this side of Pixar. Selick is going to be a masterpiece at this medium; each of the sets is so vivid in detail, so well-constructed, they feel used and homely. This sense of location is important to Coraline as it adds the comfortable and the uncomfortable and plays with our conceptions of those concepts. Based off a novel by Neil Gaiman, I cannot say if it follows closely or not, but the film’s only flaw is its conventional and rushed climax and ending. While gorgeously animated, it wraps up too easily, and feels like an instructional video to beat the bosses in the video game.

Regardless, Coraline is a beautiful film, dark enough to scare kids, but nothing too adult, and adult enough for us to enjoy. A rare animated treat from a medium that isn’t computer orchestrated, so for that, it’s an easy recommendation. As an overall experience, I’d think the 3-D will be the way to go, as it is the first animated film to be constructed for the new 3-D process and it’s amazing. Coraline is a mature kid’s tale, full of great characters and has the joy that we rarely have outside of cracking open a Grimm fairytale.

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