Coraline (2009)

Admit it: you love your family, but sometimes you wish they were just a little…better. Nicer. Not so selfish. More attentive. More creative. Not so mean and not so, well…boring.

If this sounds familiar, you just might identify with Coraline Jones, heroine of the animated movie which shares her first name. Coraline, the movie, tells the story of Coraline, the girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who has just moved with her nature-writer parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman)--they’re hard at work on a seed catalog--to into an apartment house somewhere in remote Oregon. Coraline isn’t very happy with this. She misses her friends. Her parents ignore her in favor of their laptops. The only other kid around is an overeager boy called Wybie (short for Wyborn, a name the annoyed Coraline is pretty sure she understands). Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.), along with his scruffy black cat, seems to be stalking Coraline—turning up around every corner. She wishes he wouldn’t. Her apartment house neighbors are no better. The basement rooms are taken by a pair of retired burlesque “actresses,” Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), and their small pack of yappy dogs. The attic room belongs to the amazingly limber Russian acrobat Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), who claims to be training a circus of super-talented mice. Uh-huh. Coraline wants a way out.

Strangely enough, she finds one. One very boring rainy day, Coraline discovers a small, papered-over door in the living room of her family’s apartment. She opens it to find…bricks. It’s closed over. Or is it? That night, the bricks seem to open, revealing a tunnel leading to another apartment house, where a duplicate world awaits. Here, in a warm, friendly environment overseen by Coraline’s “Other Mother” (“Oh, everyone has one!”), everything is the same but better. Meals are feasts. Her Other Parents dote on her. The neighbors are every bit the fabulous performers they claim to be. There’s only one weird thing: everyone in this other world has buttons sewn over their eyes. But that’s not too much to put up with in exchange for the family of Coraline’s dreams. Or is it? Isn’t there a saying about things that look too good to be true?

This may all sound charming and cute. Charming, possibly, but not really cute. Coraline is directed by Henry Selick, who is perhaps best known for directing The Nightmare before Christmas, and this movie is several steps into nightmare territory itself. Based on a book by master of creepy fables Neil Gaiman, Coraline is a story about a child, but probably not for viewing by the younger demographic. Between Selick’s gothic design and Gaiman’s eerie story, the film earns its PG rating. For older kids and adults who like this sort of thing, however, there’s a lot to enjoy.

The best thing about Coraline is its look. “Animated film” these days usually means CGI, but Coraline’s well-rounded characters were animated the old fashioned way, with stop-motion. They’re puppets, not drawings, and they exist on sets, not backgrounds. This gives the film a richer, deeper look even than most computer work. These characters have real curves and edges, and Selick’s character designs exploit these features to their fullest. Selick favors a certain amount of grotesquerie for his characters. Bobinsky, for example, has a round torso but impossibly spindly, bendable limbs; Wybie is rather hunchbacked and seems to be able to swivel his head a bit too much; and the Misses Spink and Forcible more than amply demonstrate the requisite “T & A” for their onetime line of work. The settings are likewise impressive, especially in the “Other World,” where an entire garden seems to take on Coraline’s face, paper dragonflies really fly, small dogs run a complex theatre show, and one room is apparently furnished entirely with huge, glowing insects that double as furniture. Refreshingly for animated fare these days, this is not a musical, but the score, by Bruno Coulais, adds nicely to both the warmer and scarier moments.

Fanning does fine work as Coraline, who is not the usual kind and plucky heroine, but is allowed to be a real girl with sulky moods and bad habits. She whines. She’s rude to Wybie. She pesters her mother for fancy gloves. Nonetheless, we sympathize with her—after all, who hasn’t felt unloved? Most of the rest of the cast are known primarily for offbeat roles, and this suits the general eccentricity—and eventual creepiness—of Coraline’s world. Hatcher has perhaps the strangest role, having to be a normal mother in one world and a housewife that “desperate” doesn’t quite describe in another world. Saunders and French twitter and bicker exactly like a seasoned performing duo (which of course in real life they are), McShane gives Bobinsky a nicely odd burbling baritone, and Hodgman gets to voice something that’s not a personified PC for a change. Veteran voice actor Keith David also adds his trademark deep intonation as Wybie’s cat. That’s right, the cat. Just wait and see.

Appropriately enough, Coraline represents an “other world” of animation—one that happily gives up cuteness for storytelling. This is a film, not a marketing endeavor (trust me, the Bobinsky lunch box will not sell), and represents a merger of two fine talents. Gaiman clearly remembers that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales were pretty, well, grim. And Selick knows how to find the beautiful in the bizarre better than anyone. Those who find such talents admirable, or who simply enjoy inventive filmmaking, would do well to follow Coraline through that secret door.

Note: As a theatrical release, Coraline was also available in 3-D, and it appears some DVDs will offer that somehow as well. I saw the 2-D version. Given that stop-motion animation already lends extra depth to the sets and characters, I cannot for the life of me imagine what 3-D would add.