Cast: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French

Director: Henry Selick

Screenplay: Henry Selick

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Fantasy/Horror



CRITIQUE:


You may call stop-motion animation a twitchy thing – but you can never deny the persistence of its laboured beauty. Take away stop-motion animation, and you take away the otherworldliness of The Nightmare Before Christmas, the ingenuity of Wallace & Gromit and the dark bizarro atmospherics of The Corpse Bride. The same applies with Coraline; once you replace its storytelling medium with live-action or Pixar-esque digital wizardry, you remove its soul. That says enough for this film, a children’s fantasy-fable that is even too dark for Pixar’s usual taste. Coming from the brain of Neil Gaiman and rendered in impressive skills of Henry Selick of the oddball extraordinaire The Nightmare Before Christmas (only 5% of the world’s population knows that it wasn’t Tim Burton who directed it), Coraline brims with inventiveness and sheer labour of love that the visuals emit its relentless power. There are brilliant details here: the real world of the Pink Palace is all drab down, with greyish tones and morose backdrops, but in the Other world, colours are used to full extent – the perfect dining room, the vast theatre underground, the circus in the attic, and the magnificently built garden which resembles Coraline’s face from aerial view – heightening the magical elements in this strangely involving tale of a blasted, self-centred girl. The heroine, voiced to superb feistiness by Dakota Fanning, is unlike any other animated figures. Ignored by her parents, she embarks on a pokerfaced tour around the new house with grunts, groans and visibly emanating hatred to her couldn’t-care-less parents. When she discovers a door that leads to another world, the same exact world she lives in but only more perfect, we encounter an Alice in the Wonderland structure here, only darker and more ominous. This is Gaiman’s deliberate homage to Alice, as we familiar structures and figures here, the Other mother can be your Red Queen, the talking cat is obviously the grinning Cheshire. But there are more surprises here, and the horror lies within the perfection of life in this Other world that it is truly scary, having parents that acquiesce to your every whim rather submissively, with downstairs and upstairs tenants that entertain you, and a neighbour kid who always smile, which in return could have your eyeballs be replaced by buttons, like on a puppet. Teri Hatcher is a sly choice as the both the mother and Other mother’s voices; watch her transformation to the real spiderlike figure and her accent becomes devilish. Even British comediennes Jennifer an Saunders and Dawn French offers delight in their roles as aging actresses Mrs Spink and Forcible, respectively.



VERDICT:

A dark, beguiling twist on Alice in the Wonderland, Coraline is brimming with details, craft and sheer invention that would have children in awe and adults marvel, with a story that is even a critique to the genre it belongs: a cautionary tale of children with idealistic fantasies.



RATING: B+