CORALINE

, 100 min, 2009

Director: Henry Selick
Writers: Henry Selick (screenplay), Neil Gaiman (book)
Stars: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman

Coraline is a vividly-realized, hauntingly absorbing animated film that’s not for small children, but their nightmares might feel right at home.

Coraline Jones (the voice of Dakota Fanning) is, for lack of a better term, a complete and utter brat. She has a surly demeanor, makes friends extremely selectively (and none-too-kindly), and annoys her parents just to get attention. On the other hand, her parents Mother (Teri Hatcher from TV’s Desperate Housewives) and Father (The Daily Show’s John Hodgman) are world-weary, computer-obsessed workaholics who seem only too eager to ignore her; are they the cause of their own pain?

After moving from Michigan into a creepy new house, the Jones’s are renting rooms to tenants – a pair of ex acrobats with vaguely adult-oriented pasts (former British comedy TV team Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) and a Russian vaudevillian named Mr. Bobinsky (Deadwood‘s Ian McShane) who trains mice. Soon, Coraline meets a talkative boy with an oddly-shaped head named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), whose name is short for “Why born?” (his parents were subtle with their line of thinking, huh?). After Wybie gives her a doll which looks disturbingly similar to her, it’s not long before Coraline discovers a small door behind the wall in her living room (thoughts of Being John Malkovichcrossed my mind). Rather than a portal into an actor’s head, however, what Coraline finds is a wormhole into an alternate reality – one which looks a little bit brighter, is a little stranger, yet one which turns out to be a lot more friendly.

On the other side of the door, Coraline is welcomed by Other Mother and Other Father (Hatcher and Hodgman again), two very kind, doting and loving parents who inundate Coraline with food (her “real” mother never cooks), offer to play games (her Other Mother loves games), and garden (you have to see it to believe it). But something’s not quite right – they have buttons over their eyes. It’s all fun and games, of course, until they want Coraline to sew buttons into her eyes as well. Personally, though I don’t know if I cared too much for Other Mother’s nefarious purposes, I basically sympathized with Coraline’s desire for “better parents.” I love my parents, but they drive me crazy sometimes too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply go through a hole in the wall and come out in a world all your own? Well, one can dream.

Henry Selick, who wrote and directed, is the visionary filmmaker who made Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1996). Both of those were stop-motion claymation, though this is the first time there’s ever been stop-motion filmed in 3D. Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, this film is all macabre charm, and very, very creepy vibes. The story comes from a best-selling book by Neil Gaiman, and it reminds me in some ways, indeed, of his screenplay for Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (2005). That too involved a disturbed little girl going through a portal into a fantasy world with doppelgangers for her parents and frightening occurances. Here, as in that film, Gaiman allows his heroine to reason her way through teen angst, terrifying plot twists, and difficult emotional conflicts.

Ultimately, this is an eerie but effective, splendidly-made and well-told tale, where the moral, I think, is to appreciate your parents when you have them because you might not have them for long. I can sympathize with that too.

Note: The flywheels at the MPAA have rated this film PG, and that’s appropriate – but it’s not really for kids under the age of 8 or 9.