Have you ever seen that Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse? How a usually bright TV series suddenly seemed sinister and macabre, the tone of that episode is very much comparable to Coraline. A film that doesn’t view childhood as a nostalgic wonderland like many an animated feature, instead focusing on the darker side of the imagination.
Coraline is the latest stop-motion labour of love from Henry Selick, the person who gave us such wonders as The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Similarly the world he has created for Coraline just oozes character, atmosphere and detail. The colour-bleached, damp, world that Coraline inhabits in her regular life contrasting wonderfully with the vibrant ‘other world’ that Coraline accesses via a secret door. It’s in this other world that everything is too-good-to-be-true – where her parents smile and cook grand meals, and her friends and neighbours are in the prime of their life, but do so with the alarming defect of having black buttons sown over their eyes.
Coraline herself is an inquisitive young girl living with her neglectful, over-worked parents. She has recently moved away from her friends and is feeling bored and lonely in a strange new world, more precisely a giant pink old house with leaky windows. She’s a character with real charm and authenticity, who is just as funny and feisty as she is grumpy and irritating, very much like a real child than some Hannah Montana saccharine princess. She lives alongside a cast of real eccentrics. Downstairs lives a couple of old spinsters who sow angel wings to their deceased Scottish Terriers, upstairs a overweight German acrobat desperately training a dancing mouse circus. The voice cast all put in stellar performances, breathing life into the wonderful clay characters on offer other than playing animated versions of themselves, which is something that puts me off a lot of animated features.
Be warned children may get scared by Coraline, it’s a film that’s as psychologically unnerving as it is visually. But don’t let that put you off as the mature themes, wonderful characters and breath-taking visuals are things everybody should enjoy.
Coraline <3
This seems more of a synopsis than a review, and only wimpy-assed kids would get scared by Coraline – I work in a primary school and kids today are much darker than their Enid Blyton loving predecessors. I think you underestimate them.
If you notice the term ‘review’ is absent from this article. I tend to think of my film articles more as ‘blurbs’ than reviews, as I’m in no position to critique anything. You’ll also notice the article is free of any kind of rating system. This attitude is true of the entire site, we’re just writing about things we feel compelled to write about in the way we see fit. Not necessarily branding articles as ‘reviews’ or otherwise.
As for the horror elements contained within the film, I highlighted it just for anybody who may have judged Coraline as child-friendly in the way something like Monsters vs Aliens would be, which it clearly isn’t. But you’re right maybe kids are darker today than I give them credit for. Unlike you, I wouldn’t know.