Henry Selick's slightly familiar but nonetheless inventive and wonderful journey through the light and dark of child's dreams

Rating: 9/10 (15 February 2009)

It's important that films are still being made with stop-motion animation, the all-encompassing and painstaking art that involves hundreds of animators and designers to move pieces of plastic and mold and clay and whatever second by second and frame by frame. We still have the Wallace and Gromit guys at Aardman working well, and later this year Wes Anderson, who used some stop-motion in Life Aquatic, will be releasing a stop-motion adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's not quite a dying animation form that may or may not need resuscitation like regular cell animation.
But the form also needs ideas and fresh invention and some kind of approach that keeps innovation going on with where to take any sense of fantasy and wonder up for grabs. Henry Selick, thankfully, is a master having been the director of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and he was the right and maybe only choice to give Neil Gaiman's Coraline an inventive perspective. This is a children's film that is not limited for its audience. Kids will eat it up and mostly be good for it (the screening I went to had barely a disruptive peep from the under 12 tykes), but it also stirs up a sense of enchantment with older viewers like, for example, those who were kids when 'Nightmare' came out. It has some obvious comparisons to make to Alice in Wonderland and other fantasy lore, and its slight sense of familiarity in the conventional parts to the story keep it from being the animated event of the year.
But, as I said, it also provides the unexpected. For example a comparison to make which some may not pick up is that the first half of the film is akin to Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. Both films have that immensely powerful and intoxicating and just plain damn fun quality that is child-like with its main character's connection to dreams as a means of experiencing what is much more gratifying than in real life's doldrums and disappointments. This threw me off in the best way; the trailer and previews made it seem like Coraline has this ho-hum existence being in a new home in Oregon with her distracted parents and slips through the hole in the door in the wall and stays there for the whole movie. I was content with that expectation, but the facet of dreams meshing with reality- and reality itself already being strange enough as it is with its inspired and odd characters like the European trapeze artist and the two aged female performance artists with stuffed angel dogs- added a whole other dimension.
This time it becomes about this little girl Coraline's temptations of staying in this dreamworld, where her "other" parents have button-eyes and offer up constant treats and goodies and the father makes a garden around the house to look from the sky like Coraline's face, and how she has to overcome some pretty startling obstacles to get her real parents back into reality from the evil twisted version of the "other" mother... sound complicated? It's not.
This is such a whimsical movie that it's hard to describe everything that makes it so jaw-droopingly amazing. There may be a bias for those who gobble up new and crazy sights in stop-motion, and here some of it is just conventionally strange like the next-door neighbor boy of Coraline's with the frizzy hair and half-bike-half-motorcycle, or the trapeze artist voiced by Ian McShane with a propensity to feed his kangaroo mice (in the 'dream' side of things of course, one of my personal favorites of any movie in years), or the dead ghost children the evil skeletal mother keeps locked away who need their real eyes back. The story proposes nightmarish visions for children but nothing so shocking as to send them crying down the aisles... or maybe so depending on their temperaments (I really jumped in my seat from some shocks Selick delivered), and it thrills precisely because it doesn't pander to a child's imagination.
It's a film that understands how dreams work, and how intoxicating they can get, and why for perhaps all the dangerous reasons it's essential to have them. It also reminds us why to keep little doors that are supposedly bricked-up to stay that way. 9.5/10