2009, USA
Adventure, Animation, Family, Fantasy, Mystery
Lightning make take awhile to strike twice when it is necessary to create hundreds of poses per minute, but director Henry Selick follows up his darkly creative film The Nightmare Before Christmas 16 years and a few films later with Coraline, the story of a tough girl and the wicked alternate world she discovers.
Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) seeks out adventures to distract herself from a lonely life in an isolated home surrounded by busy, work-at-home parents and out-of-whack neighbors. When she finds a curiously hidden door, she gladly flies down the rabbit hole and into a looking glass world as perfect as she could envision. Accommodating facsimiles of her parents are a dream come true, though their black button eyes hint at suspicious intentions.
After three years of work, Selick and his LAIKA team have crafted each scene and its smallest detail by hand, and it is impossible not to appreciate this dedication. Based on the book by Neil Gaiman, the author of the comic series The Sandman, the film flows seamlessly from Selick's 1993 Tim Burton-written classic. The Nightmare Before Christmas has found an annual Halloween following through a 3D reincarnation, though the film was not initially designed for that format. Coraline is the first stop-motion film created for stereoscopic 3D presentation, and this marriage of skills is brilliantly executed. With the perfection of 3D technology to enhance rather than distract, the animation has impressive depth and definition.
Coraline is a beautiful film. Visually fantastic, it mirrors a bit of its skeletal predecessor while establishing a wholly unique vision. The music is lovely, from the haunting choirs of Budapest and Nice to a catchy ditty sung by Coraline's Other Father through the mouth of They Might Be Giants.
Coraline's neighbors are fitting distractions as entertainers past their prime who live out their better lives on the other side of Coraline's hidden door. Stage actresses Miss Forcible and Miss Spink quote Shakespeare as they shed their fat skins for acrobatics, while Russian ringleader Mr. Bobinsky guides jumping mice through an impressive routine that would seem impossible in the boring real world. Rather than a white rabbit, a scraggly black cat becomes Coraline's guide on both sides, as the only witness to her full experience.
With a hint of voodoo under a phantasmic premise, the film delivers thrills without sacrificing creativity. Intriguing and imaginative, Coraline has set a bold pace for the year's animated films.