Review: Coraline

Henry Selick's Coraline offers a steady diet of artful, kinetic stimulation.

Coraline
Photo: Focus Features

As fine-looking a 3D stop-motion fantasy that four years of top-flight craftsmanship can produce, Coraline offers a steady diet of artful, kinetic stimulation. Americanized and just a bit souped up from the children’s novel by Neil Gaiman, it sets a surly, blue-haired tween heroine (voiced by Dakota Fanning) on a supernatural shuttle between two worlds contained inside her family’s new, and very pink, ramshackle apartment home.

In the familiar everyday, Coraline’s homebody parents peck out text for a gardening catalog, hunched over their keyboards. Dad (John Hodgman) makes god-awful experimental meals, while Mom (Teri Hatcher) forbids stomping around in the muck after a rainstorm. But on the other side of a suddenly permeable bricked-up doorway and a pulsing blue umbilical tunnel, the folks’ doppelgangers reign: a permissive Other Mother whips up massive dinners of sweet breakfast food, her spouse rides a giant centipede and uses magical snapdragons to tend to a psychedelic garden, and the nutty neighbors stage spectacular aerial acts and an elaborate mice circus (shades of Busby Berkeley). But the new, accommodating parents have large, unsettling buttons for eyes, and Coraline’s not the first child to have crossed over.

Director Henry Selick’s images are never less than watchably enticing. The spatial wizardry of the 3D technology is fully integrated into the film’s rhythm, doling out few jumping-from-the-screen flourishes before the last reels. The family’s quotidian world is musty-walled gray and Pacific Northwest-grade foggy, and the Others’s dominion, initially a riot of treats, flowers, and splashy wonders, emerges as an insect-themed lair, a spookhouse child-trap.

Advertisement

If the equally ambitious Coraline is unlikely to match WALL-E in audience affection, it may be because its latter half—when Other Mother fully reveals her hand—so outshines the first. The apartments’ other residents, a pair of ancient music hall actresses (who habitually embalm their deceased Scottish terriers and equip them with wings) and an eccentric Russian gymnast named Sergei Alexander Bobinsky (Ian McShane), are more strenuously daft than funny.

And the addition of a routinely nerdy “stalker” boy, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), to the story—presumably to keep the juvenile male audience engaged—makes Coraline’s battle with the maternal witch a less independent, satisfying crusade than in Gaiman’s tale. The only supporting character who makes a genuine splash is a feral cat, capable of sardonic speech (delivered in the silky tones of Keith David) in the Other World, whose alliance with Coraline keeps him enthusiastically pouncing on the rats that serve the Other Mother.

That extended faceoff with the Other Mother, and Coraline’s attempt to liberate the souls of the ghost children whom she meets in the limbo behind a mirror, keep the story flying high when it threatens to flag into minor-league creepy whimsy. Mushrooming to a towering height, the fully agitated, sharp-boned wicked mom suggests an undead starlet. The Beldam, as the child spirits call her, is a first-rank villain and, along with a scary encounter with a pupal sac hanging in a dark theater, provides the film’s everygirl heroine with invigoratingly goosebumpy hurdles to clear. Spend the measured, spotty buildup eyeing the depths of its handmade universe and you can anticipate Coraline ripping through its climax like a feline finishing off its prey.

Score: 
 Cast: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David, John Hodgman, Ian McShane, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders  Director: Henry Selick  Screenwriter: Henry Selick  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2009  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

Bill Weber

Bill Weber worked as a proofreader, copy editor, and production editor in the advertising and medical communications fields for over 30 years. His writing also appeared in Stylus Magazine.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.