movies: coraline

Let's see... directed by the guy who did Nightmare Before Christmas... from a story by Neil Gaiman... dark themes... stop motion animation... you better believe I was totally up for seeing Coraline!

And thankfully, unlike the somewhat lackluster Corpse Bride that they loaded up with hardly any plot but a lot of musical numbers, they decided against that with this one and went for a straight story. Dark and twisted, but reasonably straightforward.

Definitely not one for the really little kids... there's actually some vaguely disturbing stuff... buttons for eyes, disappearing parents, dolls that move, old fat mostly naked ladies... this is one of those movies that kids will enjoy now and then when they're 30 proclaim that it freaked them out ...

So it should be obvious that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In a lot of ways it's really not that original or unique a story, although it does have some pretty one-of-a-kind elements in it. And somehow it still manages to feel fresh.

As with any animation art form, they finesse the process with every movie they make, and there were actually a couple of sequences where I was slightly disturbed by how human-like the movement of the characters was... and there is also a nice little scene after the credits that shows you how very complicated and just how much rigging is involved in a very short sequence.

That never really enters your head as your watching the movie though. I did find myself thinking about the 3D version a few times though (we only was the RegularD version), mostly when things flew toward the screen or had that definite foreground/background thing going on. But that was more about me than it was about the movie being overt in it's 3Dness.

Something else that I think probably comes under the general heading of "more about me" was the vague Rankin Bass feeling to some of the animation (the story is definitely worlds away from that though), mostly when Coraline was running. I'm not completely sure why though...

The look of the thing is probably what impressed me most (outside of the story, which I enjoyed)... it shines, it shimmers, it glows, it's bright and garish and dull and dusty all at the same time. I think that's part of what has always impressed me about stop motion animation, they can't just draw or render things out of thin air, everything has to be made by hand, in miniature, and usually with duplicates of duplicates.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see both Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French show up in the credits at the beginning of the movie... doubly so because they're cast against type for a change.

All in all, a very enjoyable movie, and definitely one for the DVD collection, if only for all those "how did they do that" special features... and I think I'm also going to have to track down the original book...

yani's rating: 3 hopping mice out of 5