Coraline

Abstract

[...]Coraline is a beautifully realised vision of childhood fantasies and terrors - terrors that continue to resonate for an adult audience that may never fully grow out of them.

Coraline

(Dir. Henry Selick) USA, 2009

Universal Pictures International

3-D films have been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years, taking advantage of groundbreaking developments in digital technology to break free from the flimsy red-and-green specs and often flimsier movie monsters of its first golden era. Animated filmmaking in particular has embraced the process since the release of The Polar Express in 2004 (Dir. Robert Zemeckis), and this year has seen the likes of Up (Dir. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009) and Monsters vs Aliens (Dir. Rob Uetterman and Conrad Vernon, 2009) make waves at the box office. The process has an obvious appeal for horror filmmakers too, and continues to generate interest; January brought the release of My Bloody Valentine 3-D (Dir. Patrick Uussier, 2009) while another instalment in the Final Destination series (Dir. David R. Ellis, 2009) will take its bow later this summer. In Coraline, the first stop-motion film to be filmed originally in 3-D, the two trends converge, with suitably impressive results. Adapted from Neil Gaiman's 2002 book of the same name and directed by Henry Selick, Coraline presents a memorable and meticulously crafted gothic landscape, as might be expected from the director of both The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996).

The film's protagonist is the titular Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who must leave behind friends and familiar surroundings when she and her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) move to a new home, the Pink Palace. Her distracted and busy parents make half-hearted efforts to keep their daughter occupied, setting her apparently pointless tasks such as counting the number of doors or blue things in the new house. Otherwise left to her own devices, Coraline sets about exploring her new world, populated by a collection of unhinged neighbours - Russian acrobat Mr Bobinsky (Ian McShane) and faded vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French). She also encounters a stray black cat (voiced by Keith Gordon) who will prove a useful ally, and the oddball grandson of the family's landlady, Wybie (Robert Bailie Jr), a character who did not appear in Gaiman's original (apparently introduced here to assuage fears that a female protagonist might not have enough general appeal). Soon, Coraline stumbles across a hidden door which conceals a passageway to what appears to be an alternative and luxuriant version of her own home-life, populated by friendly-seeming doppelgängers of her parents, with one suspicious difference. Her Other Mother and Other Father both have buttons for eyes, as do the Other versions of her neighbours that populate this world. Unperturbed, Coraline remains tempted and comforted by the exciting and apparently nurturing alternative reality into which she has stumbled, until she realises that the Other Mother preys on children like her, tempting them away from the family lives with which they feel dissatisfied, tricking them into staying in the 'better' world of her making, and replacing their eyes with buttons. Coraline's refusal to comply evinces a drastic change in the Other Mother - or the Beldam as she is otherwise known - who reveals her terrifying true form and tries to imprison young Coraline. She manages to escape, but on discovering that the Other Mother has captured her real parents, she must now find a way to save them as well as the souls of the Beldam's previous victims.

The film's tagline - be careful what you wish for - suggests that this is fundamentally a cautionary tale, a modem-day fairytale with instructional morals concealed within it. Thematically, the film has much in common with both Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, in which a young girl's adventures in a fantasy world on the one hand prepare her for the necessary and inevitable experience of growing into adulthood, and on the other teach her that, despite its flaws, there really is no place like home. For all its well-choreographed circus mice, angelic dogs and magical seeing stones, Coraline's fantasy world remains an idealised, domesticated one, prompted partly by her feelings of resentment for her parents, and partly by her anxieties within a new home, an uncanny space in which everything and nothing is familiar. This becomes even more pronounced when she travels to the alternative world, which morphs into a nightmarish corruption of her own home-life in which she must learn to stand on her own two feet in order to overcome and defy her 'Other Mother', at the same time accepting her real mother (and father) for what they are - fallible people. Coraline's ordeal enables her to accept this realisation, and grants her the ability to recognise the magnitude of their smallest gestures (as when her mother presents her with a small, but thoughtful, gift). Unsurprisingly, then, the film ends on a Wizard of Oz-like endorsement of the pleasures of a more realistic home-life.

It's in the invention of both of these worlds, both real and fantasy, that Coraline proves most successful, and the employment of 3-D techniques is crucial in bringing both to life. Selick and his team have produced a subtle 3-D world in which the technique is neither intrusive nor ostentatious, saving its showiest and most charming piece of 3-D trickery for the culmination of the end credits. Elsewhere, it is used to augment the visuals, granting depth to the animated worlds on display by fleshing out backgrounds and textures and rounding out the richer visuals which are introduced as the alternative reality takes over Coraline's experiences. Such nuanced use of the technique means that when Selick & co. do push the envelope a little more (as in a creepy opening sequence which features needlework that appears to stab its way out of the cinema screen in a direct assault on the viewer's sense of perspective) it is all the more startling. The film's visuals are not merely intended as an all-out attack on the viewer, then, and they prove all the more unsettling as a result. The gradual introduction of disturbing images into a mundane world (such as a creepy doll with buttons for eyes that looks uncannily like Coraline herself, or the fog-bound woods that surround the Pink Palace) eventually gives way to the full-scale terror of the revelation of the Beldam in all her skeletal and arachnid glory, as the film hurtles towards its climactic showdown. In the end, then, Coraline is a beautifully realised vision of childhood fantasies and terrors - terrors that continue to resonate for an adult audience that may never fully grow out of them.

Jenny McDonnell