Dir. Henry Selick, US, 2009, 100 mins, animation
Cast (Voices): Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, Ian McShane
Review by Matthew Rodgers
A melding of two enjoyably warped minds comes to the big screen in 3-D no less with Henry Selick's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Selick is the director who brought us the unrivalled melancholic beauty of stop-motion masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas (NOT Tim Burton), the wonderfully macabre adaptation of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach , and….erm….. Monkeybone . Gaiman's literary achievements have translated into Stardust and the highly underrated, but wondrously imaginative Mirrormask .
Coraline is a twisted little fable, a kind of Pan's Labyrinth for kids, although at times it can be just as frightening. Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) is an inquisitive little girl living in a restrictive world that stifles her burgeoning imagination. After moving to a new home, straight out of the wonky world Selick loves to inhabit, she encounters a small door that even Alice might leave alone. Through the door is the flipside of her already weird world, in which exists her “other parents” and an initially intriguing life made up of her innermost desires. Then slowly, as Coraline has been warned would happen by an enigmatic feline friend, the people in the other world begin to reveal their true intentions and coerce her into staying there forever.
It's hard to label something as imaginative and eye-poppingly stimulating as this, generic. But in the world of Burton/Selick creations – The Corpse Bride (against which this is infinitely better) and Nightmare – it can seem like it's treading familiar ground in its obscure outlook on the universe. The overriding feeling is always one of enjoyment, but never enchantment.
You can however see that a lot of love has gone into it. As a technical achievement it is peerless, and it's a testament to this primitive art-form that it remains as aesthetically accomplished as Bolt and Monsters v Aliens . It's also very rare that the sound design garners a mention in the world of film critiquing. Coraline is worthy of such accolades; the purring of the cat is just the tip of a cacophony of sounds that are as im press ive as the effective, yet unnecessary 3-D visuals.
You don't go to the movies for that reason though, so Coraline is made intriguing by the dark flickers that permeate its fairytale exterior. The syrup-larynxed cat (voiced brilliantly by Keith David), catching a cute mouse and killing it, only for it to then droop into an evil rat, is the stuff of nightmares, and the sad-sack neighbour who has his mouth stitched shut is cruelly tragic. It's certainly not for the youngest of children, but rest safe in the knowledge that it's not the “emo” baiting, Jack Skellington backpack wearing, goth fused tale you may have feared.
And despite the rather negative tone of this review, Coraline remains a pleasant experience that stands heads, buttons, and shoulders above most of the sub-standard animated fodder that it has become so easy to generate on a computers hard-drive.
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