4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Henry Selick’s Coraline Joins the Shout! Factory

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.

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.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a new 4K restoration, Shout’s UHD of Coraline renders the hand-crafted details of the puppets and décor in tactile detail. Textures are so crisp that you can make out the fuzz at the end of individual strings of yarn used for Coraline’s hair and the cross-stitching on pieces of furniture. The breadth of the film’s color palette, in everything from the fluorescent greens to the kaleidoscopically colored flower garden, is rendered with eye-popping intensity and stunning stability. A new Atmos mix is similarly overwhelming, though its strengths are rarely about pure volume and more about the increased separation and clarity of the many overlapping sounds. Much of the film’s power derives from the dissonance generated by off-screen sounds or subtle shifts in the deceptively cheerful musical score, and the new soundtrack brings such elements into sharper relief without steamrolling the speakers with added roar.

Extras

All the extras here were available on Universal’s original 2009 Blu-ray release of Coraline, but the in-depth look at the film’s making that these bonus features provide remain illuminating and fascinating. The commentary featuring Henry Selick and composer Bruno Coulais is a deep dive into every aspect of the production, from a detailed unpacking of Neil Gaiman’s novella and its adaptation to the crafting of the film’s world and the motivations for Coulais’s atmospheric, eerily childlike score. A 36-minute making-of documentary and two extras focused on the work of the Laika animation studio boast copious behind-the-scenes footage that represents a celebration of the arduous process of stop-motion animation. Rounding things out is a series of odds and ends, including photo galleries, completed deleted scenes, and storyboards.

Overall

One of the great animated films of the 21st century looks utterly dazzling on this UHD release, making it easier than ever to succumb to its atmospheric beauty.