Appreciating Coraline

Henry Selick's Coraline certainly has some of the hallmarks of the American children's story: a child, feeling neglected by her parents, voluntarily gets lost in an alternate world; over time and through experience, she learns the virtues of resourcefulness and self-reliance; friendship is invaluable, as is one's imagination; and the list goes on. But Selick's film is far more than a run-of-the-mill children's story and, instead, is something in the realm of cinematic experiment and modern parable. Selick's resurrection of the painstaking process of stop-motion animation distances it from an industry dominated by CGI while it simultaneously wows anyone sensitive to the discipline and artistry of this old-fashioned form of animation. His groundbreaking use of 3D has a similar effect; the multiple dimensions here are immersive, not sensationalist, and so Selick's film transcends those earlier experiments in 3D that served up the occasional gotcha moments to audiences at suburban multiplexes in decades past. In the process, the film provides something fairly close to what 3D ideally should be. The stereoscopic 3D process transforms entire environments within the film, from the interiors of Coraline's new home, to the landscape of her imaginary, alternate world, so that the 3D is not an effect but a method. I went into the film with relatively modest expectations about its visuals; my references were films such as (ahem) Jaws 3-D and, most recently, Robert Zemekis' The Polar Express. Coraline flattens them completely. In purely visual terms, this film advances the medium, even as it borrows time-worn methods of motion and presentation (its stop-motion animation is more fluid than that in classics such as King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts or recent efforts such as Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit).  But the film's ultimate pull lies in its central fairy-tale ideas.  Coraline's drab home  (gray and brown, muted and flat) results from the lack of visceral and emotional color in the daily, routine life of her family, and in its place, she discovers an alternate world as initially enticing as any might be, one abounding in color, laughter, attention, sweets, friendships, circus acts, dancing mice (alternate worlds, whether dreamed up by children or adults, are almost always imaginary forms of wish fulfillment). But Selick complicates matters by maintaining the traditional fairy-tale elements of mystery and terror, stockpiling horrors within this alternate universe: odd creatures, buttons for eyes, insect robots, and other feats and fears of the imagination. Yet, as Coraline finds out, these terrors contain within them more challenging and lasting ones, including pain, separation, loss, and even mortality. Selick neither belabors nor passes on the life lessons here, and makes Coraline something akin to a parable about the impossibility of perfection or of a world that caters entirely to one's wishes and hopes. Happiness, it seems, is always conditional and tempered. These ideas, which might seem relatively simple, place this film in the vein of mythologies, fairy tales, Greek tragedies, science fiction, of books by L. Frank Baum or Lewis Carroll, and, though it might be too early to say, I wouldn't be surprised if Coraline eventually stood alongside all of these as a cultural, and not merely a visual, achievement.

Some related links:

Over at Daily Plastic, a consideration of the experience of the film's 3D environment.

An article from the Los Angeles Times about the film's stop-motion techniques.

David Bordwell writes about depth cues and perspective in Coraline.

Comments

[mandingo]

Beautiful review. Speaking of animated films, have you seen 'Phoebe in Wonderland'? I think it is a beauty, and sadly underrated...

[Michael]

mandingo, thanks for the comment. I haven't seen Phoebe in Wonderland, but I'll look into -- I appreciate good animated films and haven't had a chance to see enough of them. :)

[aminosauren]

Thanks for sharing this with me.
I find this blog very interesting and animation is very good and I like it.