Reay Jespersen

Based on the book by Neil Gaiman, Coraline opens as the Jones family - Coraline and her distracted parents - move into a spacious new residence. They have part of the main floor of a huge old house, while aging former stage performers Misses Spink and Forcible stay in the basement with their Scottie dogs, and Mr. Bobinsky lives in the attic along with the mice he’s training for his mouse circus. Bored while her parents finish writing their gardening articles, Coraline starts to explore around the new grounds, meeting a local black cat and the offbeat neighbour boy Wybie, who soon gives Coraline a button-eyed doll which looks oddly like her.

When rain moves in and she’s forced to stay indoors, Coraline starts to investigate inside the house, and finds a small door which has been wallpapered over in the unused study. Her mother unlocks the door to show Coraline the brick wall behind it. Meeting the literal dead end, Coraline thinks nothing more of it and distracts herself elsewhere.

That night, Coraline is woken by small squeaks, and finds a mouse in her room. She chases it through the house and into the study, where it dashes behind the small door in the wall, which Coraline opens to now find a tunnel leading to another small door. Ever the explorer, she crawls along the hallway and through the other door to find she’s back in the same house. Only, it isn’t quite the same house. Things are different here, from minor changes to vast ones, including finding her mother at work cooking in the kitchen; something her mother never does. When her mother turns around, however, we see the buttons that she has for eyes. This isn’t her mother, we’re told. This is her other mother. And her father - in this world a cheerful pianist - has buttons for eyes, as well. Yet in spite of the creepiness all around her, Coraline still finds this home oddly appealing. The parents here pay attention to her and feed her delicious food, doing everything to make her feel welcome; to make her feel wanted. It’s only when she goes exploring in the ever-night outside, however, that we get the first word of warning. It comes from the same black cat she’d seen earlier, who talks in this world, and warns her of dangers, albeit done in an aloof style one may expect from a cat.

Coraline travels back and forth between the worlds a number of times, continuing to find the other world more appealing than her own, until she’s finally approached with the option of staying there permanently. It’s her choice, her other mother tells her. All she has to do is sew two big buttons onto her eyes, and she can stay there and be loved for ever and ever. It’s only when she declines that things turn bad. The increasingly horrifying other mother traps her real world parents, so despite her own escape, Coraline has to return to the other world and confront the other mother to release them, along with three other children who have already fallen into the same trap that had been set for Coraline. The cat tells Coraline that the other mother loves games, though she most certainly won’t play fairly. Coraline knows she has no other choice, and challenges the other mother to a game that will risk everything.

Coraline was filmed for the first time ever in a steroscopic 3D stop-motion animation, though the 3D version will only be shown for a short number of weeks after its release this Friday, the 6th. The process took the film crew a number of years to complete, with director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) opting to go the old school route of stop-motion - Gaiman’s own preference for this story - rather than using digital animation.

The 3D effect was far from mindblowing, but there are a couple of nice “it’s coming right at us” moments, and there was a definite sense of depth created throughout the film. More impressive to me was the animation itself, and I had to remind myself a few times that nothing we were watching was done on a computer (aside from “painting” some elements). Everything that moved on screen was moved by hand, and photographed, and moved and photographed again, in order to create the age-old illusion of movement. That a movie this well done and highly detailed was completed using that approach is the real feat.

The film is decidedly less dark and more kid-friendly than the book, which Gaiman wrote as a bedtime story for his own children. Even so, parents should - as always - be doing their due dilligence on this material before letting their kids see it. This isn’t a Disney/Pixar release, remember, and its subject matter may end up giving some kids more nightmares than comforting or entertaining them. Eyes sewn over with buttons and the increasingly possessive “other mother” who gradually turns into needle-limbed spider aren’t going to be every kid’s idea of a great time at the movies.

Gaiman’s immagination and execution are excellent in the story, as always, but as much as I enjoy his work and applaud/admire this new fairy tale, it has to be said that this is one of the darker and more unsettling “kids’” movies I can recall. Definitely worth checking out for Gaiman and fantasy fans alike, but parents will definitely want to scout it out before bringing the kids along.