Review: Coraline (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                             CORALINE
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: With charming images in 3-D animation we
     have the story of a girl who finds a tunnel to a
     parallel world where she has two "other" parents
     who just love her to death.  Everything is wondrous
     in this world until she finds out that ... but that
     would be telling.  This is based on a story by the
     incomparable fantasy author Neil Gaiman.  Somewhere
     between Gaiman's writing and the rendering on the
     screen written and directed by Henry Selick, this
     film loses coherence with too little happening that
     makes sense.  Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

One thinks of fantasy as a genre in which anything can happen.
Though it seems paradoxical to say it, this means that fantasy is
very highly dependent on fixed, even if arbitrary, rules.  The
viewer has to know what the ground rules are.  In DRACULA we know
what kills vampires.  If at the end Dracula gets up and we find
that a stake through the heart really does not work, we would feel
cheated.  Suppose Frodo threw the ring into the fires and it turned
into a dragon that kills him, and Sauron is as powerful as ever.
What would be the point of the story?  ALICE IN WONDERLAND is fun
whimsy, but one never really empathizes with Alice.  The real world
does not have to make sense, but a fantasy really world does if the
viewer/reader is going to buy into the plot.  If anything can
happen there is no point to the hero's striving.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a pert young girl who moves
with her family into a strange house with some stranger tenants.
There is an odd Russian (Ian McShane) in the third floor who is
doing something unexplained with mice.  There are two sisters who
live in the basement.  These people are all weird eccentrics.  But
when Coraline gets frustrated with her parents' lack of attention
to her, she focuses her attention on a strange little locked door
in the wall.  After some effort she opens this unused door and find
it leads to a mysterious tunnel into the head of John Malkovich.
No, I am getting my movies confused.  At the end of the tunnel is a
house identical to hers with a mother and a father who look like
her parents but they have buttons instead of eyes.  It seems
everybody in this world has buttons for eyes.  These parents are
just like Coraline's own parents, but they love her more.  Where
here the food her parents serve is something of a dog's breakfast,
her "other" parents serve her delicious food, much of which seems
chosen to be the short route to the diabetes ward.  The Button
World parents just love Coraline so much that they cannot bear to
let her leave.  So they may not.  And why should Coraline want to
go home to parents who are so indifferent and oblivious to her
presence?

Neil Gaiman is fast becoming to the fantasy film with Philip
K. Dick is to the science fiction film.  His CORALINE in the film
version is a story in dire need of just a few ground rules to make
sense of what we are seeing on the screen.  It is an interesting
fantasy film done in a visual style reminiscent of Tim Burton
animation.  And the film's stop-motion animation is even more
impressive in 3-D.  But at a certain point it is just not clear
what is happening and how the characters' problems have to be
fixed.  There are questions such as, who has multiple
manifestations and why do not other characters?  What does it
signify that when Coraline collects certain artifacts, that the
world around them suddenly seems to turn gray?  Nor do we really
know when the story is over.  What makes this particularly puzzling
is that the story is by Neil Gaiman, who usually is a master of the
fantasy art form.  I have not read the book, but my suspicion is
that it would make a lot more sense.  Henry Selick's previous
fantasies, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS, are good-looking films, but may not be completely
engaging fantasies.  Reportedly Selick makes some major revisions
to the story adding a major character, Wybie, who is not in the
book.  And Coraline can slip between the worlds in ways she could
not in the book.  Perhaps my problems with CORALINE were just me
being dense, but too often I was not sure what was happening and
why.

Our second button fantasy of the season is visually lush and the
stop-motion works as well as the emotional core of the film.  But
even so good an effort in so many different ways fails if the
viewer is left confused by scenes that should be better explained.
I rate CORALINE a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.  For those
who sit through the credits there is a reward of a tour de force
scene of 3-D that has nothing to do with the plot but is still nice
to see.  In fact it is worth some extra effort to see this film in
3-D.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0327597/>

What others are saying: <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coraline/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper