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We first meet Max (Max Records) as he violently roughhouses his dog.  Is he playing?  Is he always this violent?  Are we supposed to connect with this character?  The answer to all these questions is yes.  Where The Wild Things Are starts with all the momentum of a sled speeding down a massive hill.  Max plays in the snow with a joyous youthful exuberance.  He runs wild in snowy streets; he builds an igloo and provokes a fight against the friends of his older sister (Pepita Emmerichs).  There is no wasted second for Max.  He must cram in every element of play as if there is simply no time to just stop and appreciate his surroundings.  After provoking a snowball fight he is charged by adolescents.  Max smiles one last time before retreating into his igloo.  He giggles out of impish pride before being crushed alive as one of the teenagers jumps on top of his igloo.  He emerges crying.  His tormentor leaves without so much as a glimpse back.  Max nearly died.  No one cares.  As Max retreats into his home he is consumed by uncontrollable rage.  He destroys his sister’s room in a violent and vengeful frenzy.  She ignored him; she must be punished.

This is by no means a movie for children.  Max exists alone in a tumultuous world.  There are no other children.  He exists as a lonely entity without so much as a friend besides his mother (Catherine Keener).  Even she seems to grow tired of him after he attacks her while she’s sipping wine with an innocent suitor (Mark Ruffalo).  Max runs down the stairs in his ruffian monster costume, attacks his mother and bites her as she tries to pick him up.  She brings him into the kitchen, whereupon he roars, “Woman, feed me!”

Frustrated with those whom are deservingly angry with him, Max runs away.  He sails to a fantasy world, intended as an escape from the complex people of reality.  Unfortunately, the creatures that inhabit this new world become allegories for all the impenetrable people that inhabit the real world.  Max models them in his own image; unfortunately that means they are equally rage filled and bipolar.  The most important of these creatures is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini).  He has the same wants, needs, and fears as Max.  We watch Carol pine over the loss of KW (voiced by Lauren Ambrose) with the same alternating dejection and wrath that Max has over the growing rift between him and his sister.  Max empathizes with Carol and inspires him to rediscover his own spirit of play.  As they grow closer and closer, Max grows to appreciate his natural talents more and more.  As Carol opens up to Max, the two explore their own insecurities with the general transience of childhood.  Carol is Max’s imaginary friend, created to have everything Max loves about himself.  Carol is Max’s projected feelings, and in their interactions Max gains a unique perspective on himself.

As the wild things play a game at Max’s suggestion, they begin hurling “dirt clods” at one another.  The inevitable conclusion brings to mind a common phrase heard by most children Max’s age: it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  The game culminates in Douglas the giant bird (voiced by Chris Cooper) having his arm ripped off by Carol. In this Chaotic proliferation, Max finally embraces the consequences of unbridled mayhem.  He finally understands that he is simply too free and too angry.  He is ungrateful, and he is in essence a spoiled child.  His sudden revelations create a natural divide between him and Carol, and Carol reacts as old Max would: he gets angry.  As Max flees the horrors that are himself, he longs for his old life.  He is capable of appreciating it now.  Eventually we see these same maturations in Carol, but they are still in the style of old Max: he roars, then he cries.  There is nothing in between.

It’s very common for something to be lost when a music video director attempts to direct a feature.  David Fincher’s first feature after directing Madonna is the incoherent mess that is Alien³.  Michel Gondry’s first feature after directing Björk was the sputtering Human Nature.  Some directors making the transition forget about character development (i.e. Tarsem Singh’s The Fall).  Others forget that they need occasional breaks in action (i.e. Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, The Rock, Armegeddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, The Island, Transformers, Transformer 2). Where The Wild Things Are feels far too much like one of Jonze’s music videos.  Although visually stunning, it doesn’t allow viewers any time to stop and appreciate the visuals.  Oddly enough, Jonze’s first two films (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.) are all-around great movies, but it’s beginning to seem that credit is entirely owed to their screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman.  In Where The Wild Things Are, Max doesn’t give so much as a second glance to any of the fantastical landscapes and structures surrounding him.  This perspective leaves the audience to also ignore them as commonplace.  Just as a music video must for lack of time adjust tone in a jarring shift, the movie approaches every emotional change with an uncomfortable abruptness.  While sudden tone shifts are certainly effective when used once or twice, their frequency in this movie give it a manic quality that virtually eliminates any emotion that isn’t as severe as it is sudden.  Both Max and his creatures cry and then roar, then fight, and then cry again.  There is never a break; there is no appreciative moment where the creatures look at each other with a subtle smile.  Each emotion is entirely explicit.  Kaufman and Eggers should know better.  Jonze’s Adaptation. emphasizes the subtle, unstated (and frustrating) love between brothers and Egger’s Away We Go shows a couple completely in love expressed entirely through casual conversation.  The wild things never stop saying, “I love you” or “I hate you.”  All the work made to create truly organic creatures is virtually destroyed by cardboard bipolar dialogue that would be more believably uttered by 6 year olds.  Hopefully Jonze will eventually adapt to the unique demands feature films.

But maybe this is all deliberate.  When the wild rumpus starts, the audience is swept into the free wheeling style of a contemporary Smirnoff commercial.  Jonze captures the joyful cadences of roughhousing in his directing.  This is probably his best skill as a director.  He creates extreme emotions.  Thinking about how most 10 year olds appreciate the world around them, it can be absolutely solely in these extreme emotions.  They have very little patience, and little to no desire to stop and appreciate the beauty that is life.  Is it the fault of the director that he so convincingly eliminates all pauses from life?  Isn’t he really just perfectly emulating the frustrating un-appreciativeness of this particular ten-year-old child?  Yes, it is irking to watch someone act with complete abandon, but if the perspective is true to the character, then is it truly at fault?

At heart, Where The Wild Things Are is a morality tale.  It is about self-discovery and growing up.  Reread Maurice Sendak’s book and you will discover that it and Jonze’s movie center around the same themes.  By exploring these themes of family and youthful ferocity further, Jonze has created a movie that is too complicated for kids, but too juvenile in its revelations for adults.

- Paul Brinnel

Many films end with two very definitive words: The End. At least they once did. “The End” is no longer in vogue and a good thing too. Such dramatic closure is often unfit for most movies, and corrupts our notion of the characters’ lives continuing and developing well past the closing credits. Even Casablanca finishes with those two closing words; I was under the impression that it was supposed to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Ponyo, the new film by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, does not contain the word “end.” Instead, at the start of the film, Miyazaki gives us the caption: The Beginning. At first I thought this was a subtle joke by Miyazaki, considering that this is the man who has announced his retirement after his last three films, but soon realized that the film is about new beginnings, and the experience of watching it is akin to a rebirth. Miyazaki has crafted a piece of art that is so pure and innocent that while I was watching Ponyo every malevolent thought and action in my life was evaporated and all that remained was the pure optimism and hope of a beginning.

The eponymous character is a humanoid fish, I suppose. One of the wonderful delights in the mythology that Miyazaki has created in this film is that hardly anything is explained. Ponyo’s father, Fujimoto (the voice of Liam Neeson), used to be human but now lives in the sea, guarding and using the magical elixirs that balance the forces of nature. Ponyo’s mother, Gran Mamare (Cate Blanchett), is a beautiful, mystical giantess who glides through the waters. Ponyo (Noah Cyrus) appears to be their eldest daughter and after her there are hundreds of tinier humanoid fish, who look like Ponyo, except with underdeveloped faces. That’s about all of the explanation we get concerning the undersea world. The images are so vibrant and the tone is so lilting that tidy explanations seem perfunctory. After all, background mythology really only obscures the material and condescends. Take Tolkien’s The Silmarillion or all of the excess material revolving around the Star Wars franchise, including the prequels. Those works are supposed to enhance one’s appreciation of the main work, being the original Star Wars films or The Lord of the Rings, but instead lessens one’s appreciation for those works because the universe in which the characters resides becomes more important and complicated than the characters’ emotional and psychical journeys, which appear more simple as their surrounding universe expands. Detailed descriptions of undersea mysticism are less important to Miyazaki than the deeply emotional and subtly profound relationship between Ponyo and Sosuke.

Sosuke (Frankie Jonas) is a five-year old human boy who lives with his mother in a house on a hill. He finds Ponyo, as a goldfish, trapped in a jar. He immediately has a connection with this strange looking fish, and vows to care for her. He protects her and feeds her ham, which begins an insatiable addiction to pork, and truly loves her. Ponyo, as a goldfish, provides instant karma both to a vain little girl and a cynical old woman. She squirts water in both of their faces, causing physical and psychological damage, respectively.  Those two incidents map out the course of a human life. The obnoxiously intrusive little girl who bothers Sosuke at school will one day become, more or less, like the cynical old woman, Toki (Lily Tomlin), who lives at the geriatric home where Sosuke’s mother, Lisa (Tiny Fey), works.

Lisa is an incredible woman. She’s smart, attractive and attentive. In most films about young children the parents are often portrayed as cynical and stupid because they are not as naïve or innocent as their child, including Miyazaki’s own Spirited Away, where the oblivious, gluttonous parents are literally transformed into pigs. Lisa is fearless and open-minded. Bravely, she drives her car through a tsunami-like storm, and when she discovers that Ponyo the goldfish has transformed into a human girl she bypasses the standard routine of denial and immediately explains to Ponyo and Sosuke that, “life is mysterious and amazing.” Fujimoto is the antithesis of Lisa. Ponyo alludes to her father as an evil wizard who hates humans. Fujimoto is not shy about his hatred toward humans, referring to them as “empty, black souls.” He also curses the humans for their lack of environmental consideration (the relationship between mankind and nature is not the main theme of this film as it was in Princess Mononoke, but is prevalent in subtle ways as it was in My Neighbor Totoro). As far as being an evil wizard, Fujimoto is possibly the most inept magician since Mickey donned the sorcerer’s hat in Fantasia. He’s easily insulted and distracted as when Lisa accuses him of using weed killer, and he begins to defend himself instead of rescuing Ponyo. His own daughters routinely thwart his plans to take Ponyo back from Sosuke. Underwater he needs the protection of an air bubble, but on land he has to spray himself with water. The door protecting his elixirs that maintains the balance of nature is broken, and he keeps forgetting to fix it. He can barely get the attention of a group of elderly woman, but then again, his colorful pinstriped suits don’t exactly make a threatening statement. He even wants a return to the Cambrian age. What a human would do during the Cambrian age is beyond my knowledge. His wife is a bit more sensible, relishing the unbalanced state of nature as a return to the Devonian age, the age of fish. Fujimoto an evil wizard? He’s more like a classically trained vaudevillian.

The most beautiful, lyrical, and humorous passages of Ponyo occur when Ponyo is discovering the human world, and when Ponyo and Sosuke travel to look for Sosuke’s mother. Sosuke maintains his bond to protect Ponyo even when his own life appears to be falling apart. He is a wise, perceptible and mature child, which is dutifully acknowledged by his mother. The love between Sosuke and Ponyo is pure and innocent. The first words we hear Ponyo say are “Ponyo loves Sosuke!”

There is a visual grandeur that appropriately matches the emotional landscape of the characters. In his last three films, Miyazaki used the assistance of computers, which was appropriate in creating a sharper-edged look and sense of speed for those more action oriented films. Miyazaki has abandoned all technology and it suits the film fine. There is a rustic, genuine quality to the film. The pastel colors of the film, which are truly magnificent, are able to blend into one another. There is a painterly quality to the animation that is a wonder to behold. The combinations of pinks and blues open new passageways into the mind’s imagination. Miyazaki has crafted yet another masterpiece that is both visually beautiful and emotionally profound, and all I can think to say is…Jason loves Ponyo!

-Jason Bardin

The world of Harry Potter has become a dark and gloomy existence, and it’s most evident through the deeply textured color palette of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. Gone are the bright colors of magic and wonder. In Half-Blood prince, the sixth installment of the Harry Potter franchise the only colors remaining are grey, orange, brown, and green. There is hardly a trace of the blues that dominated the previous chapter, Order of the Phoenix. Director David Yates helmed both Phoenix and Prince. For every misstep Yates took in that previous effort he gets right here, except for the opening, which is an unforgivable decision to open with a jolt of terror and anarchy. A bridge is destroyed by black wisps. This act of terror is performed by Voldemort’s henchmen not to make a statement to the wizard community, but to remind the casual viewer that these are dark times. This prologue is almost nonsensical. Harry Potter films tend to build toward a grand finale. This opening is not only disorienting, but will further confuse those casual viewers it’s intended to assist. Yates then has to start building suspense and momentum all over again. He does this by employing classic horror techniques. Blinking lights in the subway, blood dripping from the ceiling, a chase scene in a wheat field. These common elements foreshadow a finale that is grand and terrifying, beautiful and heroic. However, the true moments of beauty in the film don’t come at the loud moments in the beginning or the end, but in the day-to-day drollness of the middle.

By this point in the series, right before the final installment, Rowling doesn’t have much for the characters to do, so there is a general aimlessness and lack of plot that translates exquisitely to film. At last, after five years of mishaps and plot contrivances we finally get to see one normal school year at Hogwarts, give or take a few incidents. Naturally we follow Harry Potter, played by Daniel Radcliffe who, with his boxy face and horn-rimmed glasses is a dead ringer for Harold Lloyd. I’m not sure when, but at some point Harry Potter stopped being the “boy who lived” and is now called “the chosen one.” This new title requires Harry to join the union of chosen persons, which includes Frodo Baggins, Neo, Luke Skywalker, and it’s founding member, Freder from Metropolis. When Harry is not busy fulfilling obligations as a savior, which primarily involves attempts at attaining a memory from his potions professor, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), he’s trying to get a kiss from his best friend’s sister, Ginny (Bonnie Wright). They don’t have a whole lot of chemistry, but then again, Harry is cheating in his Potions class, using the notes and formulas of the Half-Blood Prince, who has committed his life’s work in the margins of Harry’s textbook.

The class that the film is primarily involved with is Slughorn’s. He teaches a class on potions, which seems to be more of a course on black-market pharmacy than alchemy. They’re making drugs. A love potion turns Harry’s best friend Ron (Rupert Grint) into a loony drunk, while a luck potion seems to have the same effect as a joint. Slughorn seems to be on some sort of uppers. He’s equally excited when he’s doting on a favorite student as when he’s gathering a giant arachnid’s venom in a vial. On the other hand, resident bully Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) appears to be taking downers. He’s often seen furious and stone-faced during public galas, or alone in a secret attic, concealed by one of those unicorn tapestries from The Cloisters, which if nothing else at least explains those tapestries. Meanwhile, headmaster Albus Dumbledore is becoming a bit too inquisitive into Harry’s social life. The lunacy and joy of the school year is so zany and carefree that you don’t want it to end. Everyone seems to have a touch of madness, which complements the wondrousness of the magical environment in ways that havn’t been prevalent in this series since Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban. There’s even a fight between Harry and Draco in a bathroom, contributing to yet another major incident that happens in a bathroom, along with the conflict with the troll from the first year and the entrance to the chamber of secrets from the second.

Some critics have expressed dissent toward some of the darker tone and general brooding in these later episodes of the series. Personally, I never felt that the world of witchcraft and wizardry was all that welcoming an environment. After all, Rowling has created a universe with not only a forbidden forest, but also a restricted section in the library.

-Jason Bardin

Back in the mid-90’s, there was some buzz that Terry Gilliam was to helm his own adaptation of this classic graphic novel of the 1980’s.  Famously, Gilliam proclaimed that to be true to the source material, a 12-part mini-series was in order.  Needless to say, no one financed this aforementioned effort.  Cut to two years ago: the great Zack Snyder, fresh off his “victorious debut” with 300 is deemed the brilliant mind capable of turning this complex character drama into a mainstream action movie.

Before I start to really pick apart this film, I must say that I am a huge fan of Alan Moore’s original graphic novel.  It is brilliant, revolutionary, visually stunning, brimming with mind-bending complexity, and above all an absolute joy to read.  I’d like to say that a tremendous amount was lost in its translation, but in reality, the problem is more that so little was lost in translation.  Snyder has proved to us that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the point of adapting source material for the screen.  Rather than creating a film that can stand on its own, he has sowed this 2.5+ hour monstrosity so filled with references to characters and events developed far more fully in the book, that this movie is nearly impossible to follow.  I hear the director’s cut might reconcile this, but at the cost of making the unfortunate viewer sit through an additional hour of previously unused footage.

Watchmen takes place in a universe where superheroes are real.  That concept needs a large amount of explanation.  Snyder gives us a title sequence of “stills” that are meant to bring the viewer past the rise and fall of the superhero (a period of about 40-50 years).  There are a few more allusions to these past events as the movie goes on, but never is the audience specifically told: this is why super heroes are real; this is why their world is different than ours; this is why you should give a damn about what is happening on-screen.  The audience is thrust into a world they can’t possibly understand, almost entirely in medias res.  The effect is an unfortunate one.  Who are these decaying characters that claim to be the superheroes of old, but only spend fleeting time on-screen, with little or no reference made to anything that happened to them prior.  Who can care when one of them dies or cries or lies or has an affair?  We know nothing about these people.  If Snyder didn’t have the screen time to develop characters, then why did he instead opt to stick them into a scene or two, and just assume his audience could surmise that in some way they must be important, even if he has not taken the courtesy to indicate why.  Yes, if you read the book, everything would make sense.  But should reading the source material be a prerequisite to watching the movie?  Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of adapting it in the first place?

Mr. Snyder, you need to make changes, “adaptations” if I might be so bold, if you wish to successfully “adapt” a book for shooting as a movie of any reasonable length.  A literal adaptation could not possibly fit within Hitchcock’s classic rule that the length of a film need by directly proportional to the endurance of a human bladder.  Gilliam understood this when he said it would take 12 hour long parts to do Alan Moore justice.  Snyder would have been better suited to take a cue from Victor Fleming and suitably change the story into that of a self-contained movie, as opposed to an abridgment of an un-adaptable source material.

Few things made this film watchable.  (Here’s a hint: it definitely wasn’t a bizarrely long sex scene, or the soundtrack, which seemed to come from a CD titled “Greatest Hits of Hollywood Soundtracks: 1990-2008.”)  Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, and Patrick Wilson make their characters the only really believable things in a terribly unexplainable world.  These three acted as if even though their histories were never addressed on-screen, they still existed as complex human beings nonetheless.  Everyone else was mediocre, with the exception of a certain Miss Malin Akerman, to whom I attribute a new depth of mediocrity.  Her scenes might have been more believable had they been played by any of our great deceased leading ladies of the 40’s and 50’s (their present condition withstanding).

In conclusion, this is a bad movie.  If you really want to experience Watchmen, put your ticket price towards a copy of the 1987 original.

-Paul Brinnel

Life isn’t easy for Coraline Jones. Her relationship with her parents is not humbling. They have moved her from the post-economic collapse, poverty-ridden Detroit, to a barren woodland landscape out in Oregon. They’re busy working. They have no time for their daughter. The mother (Teri Hatcher) in particular is short tempered with Coraline (Dakota Fanning), and while the father (John Hodgeman) is congenial enough, he too is under his wife’s strident demands. Coraline can often be temperamental, and she does not see the big picture. When she is shopping for her school uniform with her mom, she wants a pair of vibrant, orange gloves to contrast with the drab outfit. Her mother refuses and Coraline is left miserable. She does not realize that they are shopping for her uniform on the day when school uniforms are on sale for half-price. Yes, her mother yells at her and is impatient, but she is the same way with her husband. She’s trying to get him to focus and keep Coraline out of the way, so that the book they’re writing can be finished and sold. The parents have plagued Coraline in other ways. Through some genetic mix-up Coraline inherited strikingly blue hair, and through a lack of foresight, her parents decided to scramble the vowels in her name. She has to correct every one from saying Caroline. Only the mice seem to pronounce her name properly, but they only communicate through Coraline’s upstairs neighbor, Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and he believes that they’re pronouncing it incorrectly. The cat gets it right too. Wait. Blue Hair? Communicating mice? Verbose cat? No, Coraline is not a straight domestic drama, concerning poverty amid a dysfunctional family. It’s a 3D, stop-motion, surrealistic extravaganza from that madman of animation, Henry Selick.

At first, everything seems normal. The slow pacing and lilting music in the first third of the film is soothing, as we follow Coraline, bored and lost in her own home. Too many animated films of recent years, particularly ones produced at DreamWorks, are geared toward a constant peak. Those films do not build. It’s high energy and high action, all the time, in a candy-colored palate. Coraline breaks these kid-motivated credentials. The colors are bleak and appropriately reflect Coraline’s condition. The opening scenes are of Coraline walking around the house, counting windows, meeting neighbors, fighting with her parents. Then she finds a portal. It’s a knee-high door, in an empty room of the house. When she opens it there is a long, circular tube that leads to the other end. When Coraline crawls through it, she does not spend fifteen minutes inside the mind of John Malkovich. She is led to an alternate reality, where the atmosphere is brighter, and her parents are nicer. Her father takes on the persona of Bing Crosby, which gives him a silky voice, a smooth demeanor, and the ability to organically burst into song. Her mother becomes Martha Stewart. She cooks, she cleans, she compliments. An added benefit to this universe is that no one ever loses a button, because they’re stitched to every one’s eyes, with no exceptions. humans, mice, toads, and Scottish terriers, all see through four-holed button vision. The adventures in this universe are sizeable. But it is only after things go awry and Coraline begins to fear this alternate existence that we are treated to a true spectacle. As she wanders away from the house, in conversation with the aforementioned cat, the pieces of the universe are removed as if the whole world were a puzzle. What is left is the white, blank expansion of nothingness. As she continues to walk, she returns from whence she came. It’s like the insulated world in Pleasantville, except lonelier and even more artificial. It is here that Coraline realizes that it would be better to live in a world of mistreatment than an isolated existence, where the world does not expand to fulfill the requirements of a curious, growing, young girl. That, and she would have to have buttons for eyes.

An animated film of this caliber can only exceed in the same manner as a live-action film succeeds. It requires the sure-handedness of an auteur at the peak of his or her abilities. At Pixar there is no secret magic formula that makes theirs films unique. They allow a single director with an artistic vision to create the film that he or she wants. Because animation is bounded only by the vision of its director, the films are made uncompromised. These then are true auteur films, and through animation some of the greatest directors have emerged. Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird are the best of the visionaries from Pixar; Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata cultivated the auteur theory applied to animation before them at Studio Ghibli. The director in question here is Henry Selick. Selick’s first two films The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach are often wrongly attributed to director Tim Burton, who served as producer. However, it can be seen through the style of those two films, which continues through Coraline, a director with an individual vision: dark, fantastical, grotesque, and fluid. The characters he creates are often emphasized vertically, like Mr. Bobinsky, who leaps into the air, as if refusing to believe in gravity.

Selick is not a pioneer in the art of stop-motion animation, but its life support. In the Hollywood of yesteryear, masters of stop-motion, such as Ray Harryhausen, were kings, and were needed for the big special effects films of those days. Now CGI is king, and stop-motion has seemed to lose all-purpose. CGI, which is fake, looks real, while stop-motion, which uses real clay figures, looks fake. There is a beauty to stop-motion; it can be quirky and stylized. Selick’s animated work of the colorful and exotic aquatic life in The Life Aquatic, contributed greatly to Wes Anderson’s bizarre, pastel shaded, deadpan universe. He revived stop-motion animation with The Nightmare Before Christmas, and in Coraline, has directed the first 3D Stop-motion animated film. I’m usually averse to 3D. I find the process pointless, the image to be darker and not as sharp, and the glasses to be a nuisance. The new glasses design, a black, plastic frame, presents the image of the national convention of Woody Allen look-a-likes gathering to watch a movie. Of course it will never be one of his movies. 3D seems to be for animation and oversized live action films, like last years cartoonish rendition of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Here, however, I do not necessarily reject the third dimension. I still maintain the process is unnecessary, but at least it did not taint the film as it did for Disney’s Bolt, which was already tainted by cliché character development and an overdose of cuteness. Story and style can sometime win over excess technology.

Unfortunately, the story does not win over enough, as Coraline sails through into the third act and comes to what after the first hour would seem unthinkable: predictability followed by cliché. Coraline, in a series of incidents that has all the complexities of a video game, challenges her alternate reality mother, her “other” mother, to a challenge. If she can find the three sets of eyeballs of the ghosts of three children, and then find her real parents, she can return to her world. Hercules had twelve heroic tasks to prove his might; Coraline has a scavenger hunt. She faces a foe at each location. She beats the boss, collects her prize and moves on to the next level. She could be Super Mario. There are some rather nice visual flourishes at this point, but they’re mostly the blank expanse of a universe in decomposition that we have already seen. The tagged on happy ending is more artificial than the alternate reality. Selick lets the audience off the hook, and allows them to leave the theater thinking everything is all right with the universe, as if we should forget the first hour of the film, the hour we so desperately want to savor.

-Jason Bardin