Coraline (2009)

Coraline is one of those movies you just can't deny has something great to it. After a slow start presenting the 11-year old Coraline's family and their relationship to us, the movie takes us all the way to another world in which her family is everything she ever wanted them to be. But something is wrong and she soon finds out. When Coraline enters the other world you'll see the immense amount of artistry that's put into the design of the movie with lots of great designs of both landscapes and character design. A great debut for Laika Entertainment which puts them as a competent player in the stopmotion industry. Worth watching at least once.

Coraline is not your average animated film. It is far darker than any animated film I've seen, definitely not for younger children. This film focuses on a pre-teen girl who has just recently moved to a new place with her parents. She discovers a new world where she has everything she could ever want. Wonderful nice parents, great food, beautiful surroundings.... She starts to visit this place regularly, through the little door in the house, and before too long, she begins to realize that this new place might not be so great after all. This place turns out to be a dark place full of trouble. I liked Dakota Fanning as the voice of Coraline, and I also liked Teri Hatcher as the voice of the mother. The animation is done well. The writing is fine, it's not great to be honest, but it's certainly not bad. It's just that I was expecting more than what I got. The plot was interesting, but I do think that the film had more potential. Overall, I suggest Coraline mildly, it's not the best but it's still pretty good.

This is a beautifully-drawn and imagined world. However, the 'other' world Coraline finds herself in is actually quite terrifying to children. Watching with my 11-year old daughter, we had to switch off half way. I recommend any parent who is thinking of showing this movie to a child under 12 to watch it first in private.

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.