Dir. Henry Selick
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Teri
Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French
In The Goonies and Stand By Me
our heroes have one last adventure before their life changes forever. For Coraline
Jones (Dakota Fanning), however, her life has already changed. She has been
separated from her friends back home in Pontiac, Michigan, after her family has
relocated to dank, damp and dreary Oregon. Their new house is dilapidated. It
has silverfish in the bathroom, it is surrounded by a sea of mud, and the
inhabitants of the other apartments in the ‘Pink Palace’ are elderly and
eccentric, dreaming of past glories. She has to look forward to a dull grey
school uniform. Even brightly-coloured striped gloves are off the agenda. The
nearest she has to friends are the weird “stalker”
Wyborne (Robert Bailey Jr.), a manky cat and a button-eyed doll that resembles
Coraline herself.
And then, during the night, she
wakes. Her feet lead her to a small door set into one wall. When discovered
that day it was closed off with bricks. By night a strange multicoloured tunnel
leads away. And it opens up… back in her house. But this is a strange
reflection of her house. Here everything is different as if designed to appeal
specifically to her. Everything has been improved. Her room is bright and
glowing with friendly toys. Her friends speak to her from their photograph.
Wybie is silent. He odd neighbours have achieved their ambitions: Misses Spink
and Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) are beautiful acrobats
performing to a theatre of Scots terriers and Mr Bobinsky (Ian McShane) has
trained his performing “jumping mice”
to be truly “amazink”. Her father (John
Hodgman) is fun, zanily-dressed and has created a magical garden modelled on
Coraline’s own face. Her mother (Teri Hatcher) is loving and has become an
amazing cook. Except that she is not Coraline’s mother. She is her “Other Mother”. Everyone in this dream
world has buttons for eyes, like the doll Coraline was given earlier. And as
her visits continue Coraline is presented with a choice. She can stay in this
dream world forever. All that is required is that she lets her Other Mother
replace her eyes with buttons…
And it turns out that she might
not actually have a choice at all. The Other Mother is quite determined that
Coraline stay and let her love her. She even kidnaps her real parents. Coraline
must hence take on “the Beldam” to
free herself and her parents.
Coraline is bored. She just wants
some attention from her parents. When she finally gets it the sun comes out and
everyone has a good time. But the Other Mother wants more than attention. She
wants love. This is what she feeds upon. Letting her replace a child’s eyes
with buttons is the ultimate form of love and trust. And it has ended so badly
for other children previously. They were lured in by attention and fun and “treasures and treats” and seeing their
fondest dreams live. Now they are trapped ghosts: Coraline has to free them,
too, by finding their eyes. But if the Other Mother cannot be given the love
she is perfectly willing to take it. Yet even then she can be side-tracked with
games and challenges.
Coraline is based upon a Neil Gaiman novel, but it is most
stylistically related to A Nightmare Before
Christmas – an earlier work directed by Henry Selick (yes, I thought Nightmare was directed by Tim Burton
too. It turns out that he just produced and co-wrote it). Like the earlier film
Coraline is stop-motion animation.
And it looks fabulous. The real world is wonderfully detailed, and the Other
World is just visually stunning, exploding with colour and texture and magic.
Sadly it came out in the same year as the luscious – and highly moving – Up, robbing it of awards. While Coraline is moving (seeing Coraline come to appreciate her parents
and vice-versa) it dis not have quite the same emotional impact. It is,
however, much creepier. Much, much creepier. Bruno Coulais’s music, featuring a
childrens’ choir singing in a made-up-language, is spine-tingling from the
get-go. The opening scene of a doll being, essentially, tortured and
eviscerated by needle-like fingers before being put back together again is
quite squirm-inducing. As the Other Mother gets more possessive and demanding,
her blank black button eyes gleaming insectoidally, the peril cranks up. “How dare you disobey your mother?” indeed. It gave my girlfriend the creeps, so I’m
not sure that this is quite a kid’s movie, even if it is an animated adventure
about an 11-year old girl.
 |
| At £5.50 for a box of popcorn at the Odeon it was no wonder they tried to smuggle in their own |
What have I learnt about Oregon?
Again we have the hills covered
with pine-trees. Again we have the rain, the fog and the mud. It seems that there is a bit of a consistent theme with depictions of Oregon. The Oregon
presented in the film is washed out and grey with damp bathrooms and banana
slugs. It seems quite conformist with some ways: Coraline has to wear a grey
uniform for school.
Yet there is eccentricity too.
The town has a Shakespeare festival, and its streets have folk in medieval garb
spouting rhyme. The house into which the Joneses move has other tenants,
including two elderly Shakespearean actresses (though posters for shows such as
King Leer and Julius Sees-Her suggest that in their heyday they had a bit of a
burlesque twist on the Bard) and an elderly Russian acrobat and circus
performer. The house itself is a grand Victorian mansion made of wood and
painted pink, now sub-divided into separate apartments.
Can we go there?
This version of Coraline is animated. Yet it was, in
fact, filmed in Oregon. The sets were created in a warehouse in Hillsboro, west
of Portland. But the film was set in the very southernmost part of the state,
not far from the Californian border, in Ashland. Ashland is, indeed, home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Overall Rating: 3/5
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