Eerie without the feel

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2009)

Henry Selick is a stupendously imaginative film artist. His stop motion movies are pure eye candy, full of magical and bizarre settings and characters. Coraline takes it all even further. It is a beautiful, surprisingly colorful world filled with incredible set pieces and settings. There are some slight annoyances, like some over animated characters that have just too many moves or facial expressions. I'm not quite sure how to elaborate on this, but when, for example, Caroline follows every single word with whole range of different facial expressions, just so we could gasp some more at the animators brilliance, she loses some part of her character in the process. But, that is not the main problem of this film.
Main problem of the film is the screenplay. I have come to know Neil Gaiman primarily through his Sandman comics, and one thing I can say about him, is that he is too imaginative for his own good. Every single story line he wrote in there was brilliantly simple to start with, full of eerie, magical mythology and characters, some very, very nice fantasy for young adults. But then, he would continue on, and stuff every story with just to much intellectual mambo-jumbo. He would put artificially intellectual words into characters mouths just so readers would go on and say: woow, this guy is really well read. And I am aware that some teenage emo girl will fall in love with this paper thin kind of intellectual snobism that is wrapped in eeriness and cool blackness, but in all honesty, it is quite tiresome after some time.
And that is true in Coraline's case. Story line is fantastically beautiful on paper, girl finds a door in her house, door leads to "other family" with buttons for eyes, cats can talk and she is surrounded with nice and yet creepy characters. There isn't much for an older viewer to appreciate apart from visuals. Coraline herself is somewhat annoying character, you don't quite care for her, and all the wacky characters don't serve much purpose. Of course there is some Shakespeare quoting thrown here or there (it is a Gaiman story after all), just so older viewers could think that they are watching something deep, and that is not quite the case. Movie is trying really hard, but, once again, apart from brilliant visuals, there isn't much going on here. Even though there is something going on all the time. It is quite a feat, I must admit.
And, as always with this kind of movies, little details are it's best part. Is it the piano that plays the father or angel dogs, it is little things that Gaiman always excels at, and Selick really lifts it way up high.
All in all, this is a poor man's Alice in wonderland, minus the genuine originality and plus forced eeriness and narrative spices without flavor. It is not bad by a long shot, but I kind of feel that this movie should be watched inside it's young teenage target audience to really be accepted as a masterpiece. And I know if I was fifteen right now, that I would be in love with it.