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Happy
birthday? Coraline’s Coraline eyes a cake. |
Through
the Looking Glass
By
Laura Leon
Coraline
Directed
by Henry Selick
To call Coraline a children’s movie is like calling
The Wizard of Oz a film about tornados. And yet, when
I’ve recommended this stunning movie to people—which I’ve
done a lot since seeing it a few days ago—every one of them
has responded with a bewildered “You mean the kids’ film?”
Based on an internationally popular book by Neil Gaiman, Coraline
is the story of a little girl’s adventures in an alternate
universe, which at first seems all sunshine and ice cream,
but becomes a horrific embodiment of being careful what one
wishes for. Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) has just moved
with her horticulture-journalist parents (Teri Hatcher and
John Hodgman) to grim and gray Ashland, Ore., where they rent
out part of the Pink Palace, a repository for a motley crew
of inhabitants. Tellingly, Mom and Dad are the types of workaholics
who don’t practice what they preach, or, in this case, type:
They hate dirt and the outdoors. Bored after visits with circus
strongman Mr. “the Amazing!” Bobinsky (Ian McShane) and the
long-retired, er, actresses Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders)
and Miss Forcible (Dawn French), Coraline investigates her
new digs. This is how she comes upon a little door, wallpapered
over, which reveals a mysterious passageway to said alternate
universe. There she finds her Other Mother and Other Father,
waiting to feed her delicious treats and to play games. “I
never knew I had an Other Mother,” ponders Coraline, to which
she receives the haunting reply, “Well, sweetie, everybody
does!”
Coraline is drawn to the magic beyond the trap door, but before
long, things take a turn for the decidedly weird. It’s bad
enough that the Other Parents have buttons for eyes, but when
they expect Coraline to exchange her own vision for the same,
the little girl decides home wasn’t so bad after all. Too
bad she’s trapped, and the closest thing she has to a friend,
Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), has been tortured and maimed (by
the Other Mother), and basically rendered useless. Coraline’s
efforts to save herself makes for thrilling viewing, immeasurably
enhanced by the wondrous mix of stop motion and 3-D.
Who knew that 3-D could actually embellish an already winning
story, and not just be a weird gimmick or toy that the studio
honchos drag out on occasion, just because they can?
Coraline
is not for the very young, not just because of its macabre
nature, but because the images of sewing needles coming right
out of the screen toward your solar plexus, or of angel dogs
floating right through you, might be too disconcerting. Director
Henry Selick, who worked visual wonders with earlier films
like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and
the Giant Peach, outdoes himself, and our wildest dreams,
rendering the oldest, most cynical audience members gape-mouthed
in wonderment. A part of me was disturbed that the harbinger
of doom and disaster is the Other Mother, whereas the Other
Father is innately useless and benign, but isn’t that the
way with most classic fairy tales? To overanalyze this conceit
is, in my opinion, to miss the grandeur and also the emotional
heart of Coraline, and this is a movie that truly should
not be missed.
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