"Through The Looking Glass" Revisited?

Rating: 8/10 (23 September 2009)

Lewis Carroll had read a lot of Charles Dickens when he wrote "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through..." a century and a half ago. He understood the formidable mind of the neglected child with an IQ of 130 or more. And that's pretty much what we have here.
If understood for what it is, "Coraline" is a very sophisticated look into the inventions of alternate realities many small children will turn to in the face of parental abandonment.
It's a road singer Tori Amos (herself a "recovering brilliant, but abandoned, child") has gone =waaaay= down in her work for the past 20 years, though not in this particular fashion. (It's also a theme Tim Burton is examining a bit with the redoubtable Johnny Depp as the "Mad Hatter" in next year's "Alice...")
The =big problem=, of course, is that some of these children go down that road and never really come back, forever using fantasy as a defense against the insecurities from which they were unprotected as toddlers, pre-schoolers and grammar school children. We call the unfortunate result "psychosis" if the unreality is near total, and "borderline" if it's just "here" and not "there."
This is a =terrific= film that parents should watch =with= their children and discuss afterwards.