First off: it's Coraline, not Caroline, and her blue-haired watermelon head shouldn't be able to rest on that lanky puppet body. A feisty and curious 11-year-old who's bored with her parents and their new apartment in a pink house somewhere in the rainy Oregon woods, Coraline owes her voice to Dakota Fanning, her motions to Henry Selick, and her story to Neil Gaiman. Her film is a wonderfully engaging and exciting tale of mystery and imagination.
In the rotting nooks and crannies of the new house, Coraline discovers a hidden doorway behind the wallpaper. At night, it transforms into a passage to a strange mirror world where doubles of her usually distracted parents (voices of Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) lavish loving attention on Coraline, where the oddball neighbors are friendlier, and her pesky friend Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) doesn't talk at all. Only the fact that her other parents' eyes have been replaced by black buttons serves as an eerie warning that something isn't quite right.
Coraline
FocusCoraline's adventure is giddy with outrageous sights and some truly frightening moments-- the film modulates its moods deftly, and the otherworldy surprises include angel-winged terriers, Hamlet's "what a piece of work is man" speech delivered on a trapeze, and a full bottom eclipse of the moon, all presented in immensely appealing 3-D visuals.
And no wonder: director Henry Selick is a veteran of stop motion animation, the pain-staking process in which actual puppets and sets are manipulated and photographed frame by frame. As the first stop-motion film shot entirely in 3-D, Coraline looks dazzling, with a crisp texture that suggests real weight, something I didn't quite know I was missing from computer animation. The physical effort and meticulous timing required by stop motion pays off in extraordinarily satisfying images that suggest the documentary reality of something actually observed, no matter how fantastic.
From A Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach to Monkeybone, Selick's work has always been fascinating, but he has never had better material to work with than Coraline (sorry, Roald Dahl and Tim Burton). Based on Gaiman's best-selling book, Selick's script remixes fairy-tale tropes familiar from the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll (or, more recently, Pan's Labyrinth and Spirited Away) and injects them with enough novelty to make the result both fresh and timeless. It's a story told with care and love in which the details, emotional notes, over-the-top delights, and profoundly scary bits are all executed equally well. See it in 3-D if you can, and take your parents.
