When you see an animated children’s picture in a crowded suburban theater, you naturally expect your viewing experience to be marred by a whole slew of tiny voices of complaint wafting down the aisles. Even a chart-topper like Finding Nemo will have its share of angry chair-back kickers, and why-are-we-here whiners.

            But not Coraline.

            The colossal auditorium where we caught our matinee was filled with a breathless, shocked intensity. I cannot call it silence, because there were ambient sounds—just not the ones you would think. A hushed inhalation from a nearby five year old girl, her hands white-knuckled against the arm rests. A gulp of horror from that chubby second grader two rows down—the one desperately clutching the tub of popcorn in his lap. A gasp of surprise from the parent to your left. Squeals of something like fear from the usually too-cool-for-words tweens in the railed stair niche.

            Why is this, you might ask—that is, you might ask if you have not seen the film. If you have, you do not need to ask. You already know the answer. It is because Coraline actually dares to be scary. No, not elementary school scary, but scary scary.

            Part of this is due to the remarkable frame-by-frame process, or “stop motion,” the animators used to make the film. At its theoretical core, stop motion is the simplest of special effects (f/x) formats. Inanimate objects like clay puppets are made to “move” on screen by painstakingly adjusting their positions thousands upon thousands of times before the cameras. We can all remember Ray Harryhausen’s spectacular stop-motion work in the fifties, sixties and seventies—in Golden Age classics like Jason and the Argonauts and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Back then, the facility was used sparingly, for cost reasons, to fill the f/x gaps in otherwise live action fantasy and science fiction films. Harryhausen, the preeminent f/x genius of the Golden Age (which runs from the mid-fifties to mid-seventies, by my reckoning), possibly of all time, calls his process model animation. He distinguishes it from the puppet animation we see in Coraline by explaining that in model animation the idea was to blend the stop action sequences directly with the live actors.

            Whatever you call it, it is hypnotic.

            Here, of course, there is no blending. The facility is the medium, and it has to be seen to be believed.

            Even in happy, sunny movies, stop motion cannot escape a jerky, inhuman quality. When you employ the process in a horror picture, especially a little kidsy one like this, the characters seem to march in almost involuntary parade step, as if they are being propelled against their wills everywhere they go, like—well—zombies. It is unsettling for a grown-up to see. Its impact on small children probably cannot be accurately measured, except to say it renders them preternaturally quiet. What is going on behind those wide eyes is anyone’s guess. My guess? A lot of future nightmares are being gift-wrapped back in there somewhere.

            The design is downright creepy—full of spooky gardens, pulsing insectile furniture, skeletal adversaries, exploding fat women, and dissolving landscapes.

            But the biggest reason why Coraline captivates its young audience so completely is the nature of the story. The film presents what may be a perfect storm of fears for the bubblegum set. An unholy trifecta, if you will. At heart, it is all about the terror of losing first one’s parents, second one’s sight, and lastly one’s self.

            It is, however, the first prong of that three-tined pitchfork that really stabs into the heart of the teeny-bopper crowd.

            Coraline (the plucky Dakota Fanning) is a smart, tough but bored eleven year old girl who resents her parents’ inattention. She has just arrived at her new home, a towering, ramshackle triplex called the Pink Palace tucked away out in the woods, and doesn’t have any friends yet. Mom (a sure-voiced Terri Hatcher) and Pop (the always droll John Hodgman), while nice in a distracted real life way, are particularly crabby these days, and spend their waking hours trying to finish writing an all-important gardening manual—a book whose ultimate sale the family’s financial well-being depends upon. They do not have time for Coraline. Period. She is repeatedly sent on busy-work errands, just to keep her out of their hair.

            So, in an effort to kill time, and in something of a huff, she starts exploring.

            Her upstairs neighbor is a stick-limbed, pot-bellied circus acrobat named Mr. Bobinksy (an unrecognizable Ian McShane). Mr. Bobinsky trains mice to perform various song-and-dance numbers. But Bobinsky’s mice are more than just talented musicians. They are well aware of the dangers lurking in the Pink Palace and try to warn Coraline of what awaits her.

            Her downstairs neighbors are the massively obese Ms. Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and the monstrously bosomed Ms. Forcible (Dawn French), retired burlesque queens. The pair bicker constantly, surrounded in their neon-entranced cellar flat by droves of Scottish Terriers, some alive and barking, others dead, stuffed and watching from wall shelves. But they, too, sense that something wrong is afoot, so they give Coraline a trinket, a small ceramic figurine with a view hole bored through its center, for good luck.

            The off-premises landlady’s grandson, a gadget head named Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.), rounds out the supporting cast. Wybie rides a cannibalized motor bike like a maniac through the forest, and wears a welding helmet for protection while doing so.

            Coraline eventually discovers a pint-sized door hidden behind some furniture in the parlor. At first, this door opens only to the solid brick wall separating her apartment from the vacant rooms next door. But later—as Coraline’s frustration with her mom and dad mounts—it suddenly and inexplicably leads down a shaky, umbilical cord-like tunnel to an eerie mock version of her own world. This brightly hued, unusually clean reconstruction of the Pink Palace is inhabited by her other mother and her other father, perfect facsimiles of her real parents, except that they have buttons instead of eyes and seem to be way more fun.

            Coraline is allowed to eat all the yummy food she wants (something she never gets to do at home, given her family’s limited budget), and she is given glittery new clothes, covered with stars and sparkles (unlike the gray uniforms her real mother is buying in anticipation of the upcoming school year). Her other father plays the piano like a madman, and is interesting and spontaneous; not at all like her short-tempered, on-deadline real dad. Her other mother is fawning and ever so attentive.

            However, Coraline soon learns that paradise does not come without a price. If she wants to stay in her new home, she must foreswear the old, and allow her own eyes to be replaced with buttons.

            Coraline balks at this.

            The other mother punishes Coraline’s stubbornness by locking her inside a dark and musty storage room. It is here that she makes the acquaintance of the ghosts of three children who, sometime in the distant past, caved in and allowed buttons to be sewn into their eyes. They warn Coraline of the gruesome truth behind the cheerful facade. The other mother is in fact a metallic spider-like entity who sucks the souls out of her victims the minute they give up their sight, and then dumps their empty spirits into the storage room. One minor note: in the eponymous children’s book by Neil Gaiman from which this movie is derived, one of these three ghosts has wings—not angel’s wings, but fly-around-for-real wings. The implication is that the other mother visits faraway planets, or parallel dimensions, searching for at-risk children of all species. It is a shame this element is shaved out of the movie.

            Once Coraline takes proper stock of her plight, she matter-of-factly sets about remedying the situation. She is aided in this by a sassy black cat (Keith David at his absolute voice over best). The cat can cross between the real world and other world without using the doorway, and—when he is in the other world—can talk. His memorable bon mots dig deeper than his claws, which are—as several of the other mother’s evil rat minions find out the hard way—themselves plenty sharp. And his cryptic zen Buddhist felinisms are priceless.

            The movie ends with Coraline, with the grudging help of the cat, the vague though sage counsel of the three ghost children, and her magical soul-locating eye piece—that porcelain stone the old ladies downstairs gave her, squaring off against the other mother in a grand battle of wits, while the other world disintegrates around them.

            Coraline shares many traits with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy, Coraline feels abandoned by her family. Dorothy dreams of a better place “somewhere over the rainbow.” Coraline, without expressing it, or perhaps even realizing it, dreams of a better place where her parents will pay more attention to her.

            Dorothy’s new world—unlike her black and white, dust-bowl Kansas farm—is painted in vivid technicolor. Coraline’s new world—unlike her drab, work-a-day home environment—is shamefully ego-stroking.

            And for both, these better worlds rapidly prove unsatisfactory. Dorothy, old fashioned gal that she is, realizes it is just not home. Coraline, modern, emancipated girl that she is, realizes that the price of relocation is too high, and that it is just not home.

            You see, while the girls’ stories are fundamentally the same, their reactions and responses are profoundly different. Each girl confronts her situation in precisely the manner dictated by her generation.

            Dorothy is whirled up into the sky by a tornado and plopped into Oz with a resounding crash; a little girl whipped by forces beyond her control into an enchanted kingdom.

            Coraline, on the other hand, sees an opportunity—the floating, breathing tunnel between her real house and the other house—and grabs it. This plays as if it has been lifted directly from the pages of some fictional self-help book, say, “Chicken Soup for Neglected Little Girls’ Souls.” Don’t wait for the world to accommodate you, little girl. Go out there and make things happen!

            In other words, Coraline is her own tornado. This is because she is in charge of her life. If she escapes, it will be due to her wiles and resilience. If she fails, it will be because she could not bring it.

            Dorothy’s primary companion is her dog Toto—a perky, unfailingly loyal but dim-witted creature whose only real value is that of a yappy spirit-lifter. Dorothy collects her team—the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodsman—as she walks down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where a dominant male force, the Wizard, will purportedly send her home. Her team is laced together by need and self-doubt. In the end, when the Wizard is revealed to be nothing but a good hearted charlatan, Dorothy is advised to simply send herself back home by clicking the heels of her ruby slippers and muttering a please-take-care-of-me mantra: “There’s no place like home.”

            Dorothy is, in short, the quintessential damsel in distress.

            Coraline’s primary companion is a (not her) nameless cat—a sardonic, often insulting, mostly indifferent creature whose decision to help Coraline is based on naked self-interest. Yes, Coraline accepts succor from her team, something people are occasionally forced to do as they struggle to stay alive in this unforgiving twenty-first century world of ours—but her journey is her own, as is her fight. Coraline’s team isn’t laced together at all. It is, in essence, a workplace focus group composed of mostly out-sourced feeders; the brick-and-mortar hold-over captive ghosts, the off-site consultant mice, the special task software eye piece, the disinterested independent contractor cat who will sever his involvement in the project if things go south.

            While Dorothy was merely steeped in the homespun virtues of yesteryear, Coraline has presumably studied the teachings of the XBox gods, and read the gospel of the action movie prophets. She approaches her dire situation with methodical TV Generation stoicism. One can almost hear Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice, from The Terminator, whispering in her ear: “Identify target. Isolate opponent’s weak points. Position distractions. Remember back-up plan. Do not hesitate. Failure is not an option.”

            Coraline is, in short, a budding chick in chainmail.

            That is the final message of the picture: Coraline really is the hero. She is not some doe-eyed maiden blown thither by the winds of fate. She is resourceful, she is canny, she can take a hit, and yet at heart she is still a little girl who needs the love of her parents. Her real parents.

            This is why the final, final climax of the film—which I shall not describe other than to say that Coraline’s self-sufficiency fails her at the worst possible moment—is such a let down. It is intended, one supposes, to reinforce the feeble camaraderie between Coraline and Wybie, that pseudo-kooky neighbor boy who serves as her bland sidekick, and to secure the lasting (and DVD buying) affection of the boys in the audience. That intention is grossly misguided. It weakens the entire structure of the movie. The film emphatically does not need a little boy as a savior.

            Gaiman’s novel closes in a much more consistent, much more appropriate manner. Frankly, I suggest we all pretend that the movie simply ends with Coraline fighting her way back to her real house and reuniting with her real parents.

            But don’t let that little bit of grumbling on my part put you off.

            See the film, even if you don’t have kids. You will not regret it. Coraline is the The Wizard of Oz for our time. Hard. Savvy. Knowing. Plugged in. Surreal. Yet also vulnerable. Human. Real. Caring.

            And scary.

Laika Entertainment
U.S. Release Date: February 6, 2009
Director: Henry Selick
Screen writer: Henry Selick (from Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name)
Running Time: 100 minutes