Frame by Frame, World to World. Coraline is another chapter of the childhood dark fantasies which have been brought to life by Henry Selick.

Rating: 8/10 (9 December 2017)

Coraline is a 2009 stop-motion animation film that is written and directed by Henry Selick. Selick's name may sound familiar because his other more famous works include The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). With Coraline you get another great package deal by Selick, the main cast compromised of Dakota Fanning as Coraline, Coraline's mother being voiced by Teri Hatcher and father by John Hodgman and even some great supporting work by Ian McShane who voices a washed up but still eccentric and energized carnival entertainer who parades around some performing mice. Coraline herself is an outdoor, hands-on type of girl who just wants to embrace the new environment that her family has moved her to, however with the chores of settling in and finishing up on other laborious writing projects, the parents are not so envious of Coraline's desires and time.
The theme of the film is to "focus on style or texture" (Petrie, Boggs, 2012, p. 20), as previously mentioned, Selick's other works point out his unique talents in creating dark, fantasy worlds that are just passable and manageable for the older kid groups. Telling a story similar to James and the Giant Peach you find yourself following a younger person who doesn't exactly like their current situations and seek out a little more, only to find themselves on a dangerous adventure filled with unimaginable beings or creatures. The artistry in Coraline is always present with large miniature sets on display and various camera work to mimic a live action film. Nearly every time Coraline leaves the house to go outside we are treated with the "the zoom lens" (Petrie, Boggs, 2012, p. 117) showing us just how magnificent the scale of the set and detailed modeling used. The choice of colors should be noted to in Coraline as they generally are gloomy and contain shades of off blue and purple, making us all feel uneasy as to what is happening or can occur throughout the experience.
As you dig further into the story and this unnatural but seemingly better world, you learn along with Coraline that not everything is as it seems. Unraveling the disguises and illusions, you become fully sensitive to the style of film this is and appreciate the stop-motion effects. From bizarre transformations to impossible realities, the movie proves Selick to be right in how he can compete with a lighter storytelling method used by companies such as Disney and Pixar. So much so that the award-winning 2016 movie Kubo and the Two Strings takes direct influence from Selick's work, giving us all a Tim Burton Beetlejuice feeling that there is something to be made in the stop-motion fantasy worlds.
A common item to decipher the normal world to the other world in our story of Coraline would be the replacement of the eyes with simple buttons, a "motif" if you will. (Petrie, Boggs, 2012, p. 27). These buttons symbolize a dark meaning of course as to lose one's sight would mean you cannot see and naturally would become lost over time in a place that you may have believed better than the world where you could see. The dark fantasy style that Selick has become known for is after all what this film embodies and is held to, a high recommendation for those who dare to explore.