Movie 1: Coraline

Coraline Jones and her family move to a house that’s split in to three and filled with eccentric characters. Her parents are busy working on a gardening catalogue and have no time for her, never listening. Her dad gives her some busy work “counting windows or something, ANYTHING” to keep her out of his hair. During her travels around the house she finds a mysterious small door that’s been papered over and is locked. After some bugging, Coraline’s mother finds the key and she opens the door….to find bricks.

That night she follows a kangaroo mouse (I think that’s what they’re called) and finds that the bricks are gone, replaced with a tunnel that leads to another version of her house. There she meets her ‘Other’ Mother and alternative versions of everyone from her house who have buttons for eyes. Everyone there has time for Coraline, and she can have anything she wants. Everything seems amazing and wonderful. Until it isn’t.

Obviously I don’t want to give the whole plot away. The film is based on a novel by Neil Gaiman so if you know his work you know what to expect, weird and wonderful. I haven’t read the original book but I do read his blog and know that there are some changes to plot and an additional character. And it’s animated by Henry Selick, in the same stop motion style as The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach.

The animation is fantastic. The whole thing looks pretty damned gorgeous, and probably looks amazing in 3D assuming they went for depth rather that “booga booga, something’s coming at your face”. Just in 2D it still looks brilliant. I’ve no idea how they achieved the fog effect for one scene with stop motion but its probably just thin cotton wool or something and I’m being impressed by nothing.

The voice cast doing a good job, with Dakota “haven’t seen her in anything I haven’t liked her in yet” Fanning as the title character, French and Saunders pairing up for the weird actresses who live downstairs and appear to have some kind of witchy leanings, Ian McShane as the Russian guy upstairs who has a mouse circus (and some problems from Chernobyl judging by his behaviour) and Terri Hatcher as the Mother/Other Mother/Herself in the last half (only kidding Terri, loved you as Lois Lane).

Thematically it’s pretty similar to MirrorMask, another Gaiman story and very good film. Bit of a spoiler coming up so I’ll try and make it unreadable and you can highlight if you’ve seen the film:

The Other Mother/Beldam strikes me as being some kind of old god type figure, another theme that appears to be common in Gaiman’s work. Or what I’ve read anyway. She feeds off the lives of her victims and her powers seem to need someone to draw from. I’m guessing she’s a spider god of some kind going by how she works and the web towards the end. The cat being able to travel between the two worlds unmolested and exhibiting the strange powers we all know cat’s have but don’t want us to know they have is very NG to me too.

Spoilers done. While this is dark, I wouldn’t say it’s any darker than the likes of Labyrinth, Willow, The Dark Crystal, any of the stuff we watched as kids in the late 80’s. So if you think your kid can handle that they can handle this. Probably not for the young ones though. It’s not an amazing movie, but it is well worth a watch. And it sure is purdy.