Movie review: Coraline

I don't think we're in Oregon anymore. (And Oregon's a pretty peculiar place to begin with.)

by John P. Meyer

It's hard to know exactly why Coraline ends up being the excellent entertainment it is: are we to thank the dark, mordant vision of screenwriter/director Henry Selick, the guy responsible for bringing The Nightmare Before Christmas to life? Or the insightful vision evidenced in the sourced Neil Gaiman novella, with its Ray Bradbury-like grasp of the magic - and terror - inherent in adolescence? Or the astonishingly real stop-motion animated characters created by the digital effects wizards at Laika Entertainment?

In fact, Coraline represents one of those rare cross-platform blendings of talent in which the sum ends up amounting to much more than its accumulated parts.

Anyone harboring fears that Coraline may end up being just another lighthearted kid's movie will find themselves with something else entirely to fear during the opening credits sequence, which features the gruesome surgical disassembly of a button-eyed rag doll by the spidery, chrome-plated digits of an otherwise unglimpsed entity. It's a ruthless and coldly efficient operation, and it effectively sets the whimsical/magical/sinister tone of the piece.

Coraline Jones, voiced by 15-year-old Dakota Fanning, is a self-aware young animated lass with her own sense of style (check out the Greek sailor's cap) who's coming to terms with the fact that her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman, vocally-speaking) are too busy to spend much time with her, now that she's old enough to fend for herself, in terms of leisure activities. Mom's busy editing and revising the organic gardening text that Dad is busy writing - though neither one of them has time to actually garden anymore, organically or otherwise.

Couple this with the fact that the family has just moved to rural Oregon from someplace far less rural, and you'll see why Coraline might be bemoaning her lot, in terms of its excitement level. All of which is about to change, natch.

It all begins when she ambles into the woods behind her gothic boarding house of a new home and encounters a specter-ish figure which turns out to be - under his multi-lensed camera helmet - a talkative and not unfriendly boy from down the street. Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) warns Coraline about the ominous legend of the house, which includes the fact that his grandmother claims to have lost her sister there.

At their next meeting, Wybie presents Coraline with a rag doll which - oddly and ominously - bears a striking resemblance to Coraline herself. After the arrival of the doll in the Jones household, things get really weird. That very night, Coraline is awakened by cute, squeaky kangaroo rats which lead her to a disused half-height door covered over by wallpaper. Behind the door is... well, it depends on whether you're checking in daylight or in darkness, actually.

Characters even odder than Coraline's parents (the daylight versions, that is) populate the other quarters of the boarding house, including a pair of gone-to-seed, old maid vaudeville performers named Misses Spink and Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), who are perhaps overly fond of Scottie dogs; and a pot-bellied European acrobat named Bobinsky, former impresario of a celebrated rodent circus with hopes of reinvigorating his troupe. Final mention should be made of the ragged, moth-eaten cat (Keith David) who roams at will between one magnificently weird quadrant of this imaginary landscape and another.

There's an Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass plot at the heart of things, but it's more like one envisioned by Stephen King (or, obviously, Neil Gaiman) than Lewis Carroll. Here, the rabbit hole is replaced by a vertiginous, accordioning tunnel, at the end of which await wonderful - though essentially sinister - simulacra of their real-world counterparts.

In terms of visual impact, Coraline is a constant source of wonderment - truly a carnival for the eyes, particularly if you can catch the show in a theater equipped to present it in 3-D. The visual effects people behind this one deserve some kind of alternate reality bonuses.

Combine all this with Bruno Coulais' lushly orchestrated score, which is both creepy AND eerie, and you just know those Laika Entertainment folks have a winner on their spidery, chrome-plated digits.