The release of Henry Selick’s new stop-motion fairy tale Coraline may mark the first instance in my life that I begged my 11-year old daughter to see an animated film rather than the other way around.
Oh, I could have gone without her, I suppose, but that would have been less fun. She’s been pumped full of lighthearted computer animation and Hannah Montana for too long, and needs more exposure to odd, dark entertainment, in my opinion. (”Back in my day,” I say as she ignores my every word, “we watched crazy shit like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. It scared us stupid.”)
Thankfully, I wore her down. All we had to promise was that A) she could bring a friend, and B) it would be totally awesome. She’d see. Just wait.
And it is. Selick’s films (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) have laid claim to a patch of the film landscape uncharted by other works; Coraline is the most ambitious to date, and no exception to this rule. Selick’s films are a rare combination of the weird and the hopeful; the beautiful and the macabre; the heartwarming and the strange.
Thematically and structurally (and literally – it was based on the book by Neil Gaiman) this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The tale of a neglected girl who discovers a new world that seduces, betrays and tests her is the oldest kind of fairy tale. And we get all the quirky characters, the creative visuals, the twisting plot, to which we are accustomed in these tales. But something about the way this is all executed seems fresh and fascinating. (It has all this in common with another recent fairy tale film, the brilliant – and considerably more violent – Pan’s Labyrinth – almost an adult version of Coraline.)
The thing that struck me most about Coraline was how much it trusted the intelligence of its audience. We are shown character through action, not through talky back story. The film takes its time getting where it needs to go. And it never becomes preachy or overwrought in its themes – the main one, of course, being that cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for, and that anything that seems too good to be true probably is.
Plenty of kids films make this point; the difference here is that the conclusion isn’t full of a bunch of disingenuous change for the sake of a happy ending. Oh sure, the girl comes to realize that her real life isn’t so bad after all, and her parents stop neglecting her so much – but only a tiny bit. At the end, they remain fairly lousy parents. Coraline’s world is still pretty lonely. The film seems to suggest that life is like this; sometimes the bad things outnumber the good, and we should accept and make the best use of what we have, rather than dwell upon what we do not.
This results in a second theme: as we look at people with buttons for eyes, people who tilt their heads at an angle, people who completely transform their appearance, we are struck by a common thread. But I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a filmmaker of this much vision would place such importance on the concept of “altered perspective,” now should it?
The other thing I appreciated about Coraline was its consistency of its tone. This is no small accomplishment; as we progress from a slow, dry first act, to a lush, beautiful second act, to an off-kilter, frightening third act, it all still feels like the same movie. Selick shows his incredible skill and imagination in the lush fantasy world Coraline discovers, but displays his true brilliance when we revisit these set pieces later and everything has shifted 45 degrees toward the bizarre (again, the “altered perspective” theme). A circus man becomes a suit full of vermin. Adorable dogs become canine bats. It’s all a feast for the senses, and though the film is scary in spots, it’s never downright graphically violent.
Oh sure, there are uneven parts that prevent us from getting lost in the world of the film from time to time. But by and large these are infrequent moments. It’s worth seeing on the big screen, there is so much eye candy here – but you may want to skip the extra 3 bucks for the 3D version, which provides a half-dozen tastefully done “wow” moments, but nothing terribly earth shattering. (Personally I thought the Coraline boxes were a far better marketing trick than a pair of red and blue glasses.)
As the film ended and the credits rolled, I stood around chatting with the three other grownups I brought along on this adventure (the crowd was made up of more than 50% adults, by the way). Finally I turned to my daughter and her friend, and asked them both if they enjoyed the film.
“It was weird.”
“Yeah, that was so weird.”
“But it was good, right? I mean, did you guys like it?”
“Yeah..we liked it…”
“Are you sure? You don’t seem sure.”
“Yeah. It was cool.”
“Okay, put it this way: did you think it was more cool than weird, or more weird than cool?”
In unison: “More weird than cool. Definitely.”
Duly noted. But I’m still glad I brought them. (Maybe one day, they will be too.)
Posted by Nate 
Posted by Nate 
Posted by Nate 
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