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Coraline

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

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