Coated with a bizarre sense of imagination and nightmarish undertones.

Rating: Null/10 (22 May 2009)

For Coraline Jones—an imaginative, free-spirited young girl burdened with the curse of workaholic, dispassionate and distanced parents—her life up until now can more or less be summed up as a typo; a careless error of mispronunciation or just incompetence. Life it would seem is just a series of misfortunate, boring mistakes that aren't her fault; she's lost within a world of greys and pale-skinned coffee addicts lacking her own shades of vibrancy and lust for adventure. Seeking some sort of escape from her dreary reality, Coraline finds refuge in a distant home that fulfils her every whim and desire. Yet the people who provide this—her parents who are an eerily chirpy polar opposite of their real counterparts—don't offer such a paradise for young Coraline's gratis benefit. No, they want her eyes, the key to the soul and her only way back to the smoggy and bleak landscapes of her totally boring existence.
Telling this tale that will be familiar to most audiences, Coraline is a feature that mixes the absurd and artistic with the jarringly authentic to startling effect. In fact, despite the screenplay's tendency to get bogged down by the narrative's overly familiar web of themes and plot devices, the majority of the movie surprisingly transcends the usual ho-hum formula present within too many of today's children's features. Instead Coraline with its cerebrally engaging aesthetic and bizarre sense of reality offers an experience that adults will probably enjoy a little more than their younger counterparts. Yes, it's true that children will still find plenty to latch onto a enjoy here—but the truth is that Henry Selick here twists and spins an experience bursting with thematic subtext, gorgeous imagery and some wacky characters who stay true to established formula without coming off tired and mundane. Existing somewhere between the realms of Nightmare Before Christmas and Pan's Labyrinth lies the dual realities of Coraline Jones in all their mesmerizingly off-key beauty.
Taking centre stage for our story is of course Coraline herself, who, despite falling a little flat at times nevertheless gives the feature a subtle sense of overriding intelligence. Indeed, there's a distinctly modern and witty prevalence to Coraline's nature that echoes last year's Juno without stuffing it into the viewer's face. While a key element to the young, adventurous protagonist is in fact her intelligence, it is instead her short-sightedness that provides the movie with its central pulling power. For Coraline, the thought of escaping her drab life on her side of the wall in order to live with her much more loving and caring family who cook her lush meals, compose songs in her name and create vast gardens modelled after her face—the temptation is almost enough to shut the door on her "other, other Mum and Dad" and instead live in luxury coated with a bizarre sense of imagination and nightmarish undertones.
Conveyed wonderfully by a mix of creepy animation, lighting and Bruno Coulais' score however, the world that Coraline escapes to at night often carries with it an ominous, sinister underbelly hidden from clear view. In this world, dreams indeed come true, but rather than play the piano itself; the piano instead plays you. It is during these segments that the feature takes its most compelling form, mixing surreal imagery with awe-inducing set pieces combining otherworldly music with the bizarre, contorted animation style that Selick is distinctly known for. The only problem with such moments however is that they only draw attention to the extremely dry and monotonous nature of Coraline's reality; at the beginning of the movie we see her decree her new home as utterly boring, and yet it isn't until the later parts of the film that we truly emphasise with her. Of course, such a polarising element is a double edged sword that conveys the movie's central themes with poignancy, but perhaps with too much of a vigour (or lack of such).
Despite the many instances of jarringly unsettling gloom and doom however, there exists a prevailing sense of whimsy charm to much of Selick's feature here that has been hidden under the floorboards of all his major works. Indeed, while Coraline boasts plenty of scenes that top even the grimmest of horror movies in terms of establishing mood, atmosphere and tension—it is the central character, her struggle and the magical world that she finds herself in that makes that largest impression. Again, children will surely enjoy it on a purely ostensible level but adults will no doubt be able to latch onto the feature's thick subtext and eerie surrealism that provides something notably childish, but placed within the manipulative world of adults. In this vein, Coraline achieves a tone akin to most well known nursery rhymes or bedtime fables—cute, whimsical and told with a melancholic melody in tow; but sinister, broken and deeply rooted in the darker side of the imagination all the same.

A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)