I spent an enjoyable 90 minutes wearing 3-D glasses and marveling at the stop-action artistry of Coraline’s director and screenwriter, Henry Selick. I particularly liked the titles and end credits, which are as much a part of the story as what takes place from opening narrative to the closing scene.

Anyone who liked Selick’s James and the Giant Peach, The Nightmare Before Christmas, or the kind of storytelling Tim Burton attempted in The Corpse Bride with puppets, will find this satisfying as a technological feat. (I even found a little Le Triplettes de Belleville at work here in two of the characters, though it was not stop-action.) I did not know the original story by Neil Gaiman, and it’s probably just as well. And all you need or want to know is that Coraline tells the story of an 11-year-old girl transplanted by her parents from frozen Michigan to rainy Oregon, and her disposition toward the change is not rosy, especially when a chirpily-verbose lad shows up to befriend her.

Gaiman, once upon a time himself a childhood captive of Lewis’s Narnian universe, can’t help but introduce the bored Coraline to a large and mysterious house that her parents order her to explore. Beyond her bedroom wall she finds an alternate dimension that mirrors her room, her new playmate, and, most eerily, her parents. The only character bridge between the two worlds is a mangy cat, who becomes quite “instrumental” to the plot. That’s all i will say. By the end, Coraline must choose between two sets of circumstances, and moms and dads.

It’s Selick’s visual style that steals the show, though John Hodgman (“Hi, I’m a PC”) and Teri Hatcher (Mrs. Desperate Housewife) do provide strong voice talent for the two sets of parents. Dakota Fanning is ok, too, but may have been too old (already?) to do this voice. The two scariest movies I ever saw as a child were Darby O’Gill and the Little People and Village of the Damned. I believe it was because in both movies children were either threatened with death (“the banshee”)–or the threateners themselves (“don’t look in their eyes. . .”), and neither prospect made for safe dreams.

I mention these movies because I could imagine even an 11-year-old finding both the benevolent and the malevolent universes contained in Coraline’s two houses rather unsettling. Creepy. Worrisome. Sleep-defying. It is said (Tolkien and Lewis both did) that children like to be scared, as long as they know there is a moral center to run to when they feel fear. In some movies, the older ones, anyway, that might be a parent. But it is not so evident in this age, nor in this tale.

Gaiman/Selick’s story has in common with those of Lewis in particular the fact that, as in Narnia, the child protagonists have a kind of freedom from parental supervisors (perhaps even banishment from adulthood) that makes their adventure possible–and worth the risk of a nasty fate. Perhaps the risk is taken just to find out if anyone is out there, and if anyone really cares. Coraline’s parents on this side of the bedroom wall are not evil, just oblivious; the ones on the other side, perhaps too excessively attentive for their–and Coraline’s–own good.

Coraline’s finds out which may be worse. And so chooses. (I do know I will never look at button-eyed dolls the same way again.)

 
Posted in Children's Books, Movies by Bruce Edwards

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