Coraline 3D/Focus Features/2009/PG

In 1996 fans thought perhaps "James And The Giant Peach" would be a great followup to Nightmare Before Christmas. Then we had to wait a whole decade later for Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. But now, finally fans of feature length stop motion with a darker twist have something to rejoice. Nightmare Before Christmas director(no, not Tim Burton as the commercials want you to think!) Henry Selick has brought master storyteller Neil Gaiman's illustrated Coraline book to the big screen. It's really unfortunate the ad campaign and promotion for Coraline have made little to no mention of Neil Gaiman; as like his teaming up with illustrator Dave Mckean for the visionary Jim Henson film MirrorMask, this is quite a pairing fans have been yearning for.

Now you know when you have planet aligning factors juxtaposed in just the right manner in life, where you think "How could it get any more glorious?"? That would be Coraline, in 3D. 2009 is the year the film industry said would be the year for the reintroduction of it with a slightly new system, and Coraline is a great way to kick it off. You are literally IN the movie at some points, and the hallucinary effect really is noticable whenever Coraline goes through the blue portal tunnel. I saw Disney's Bolt cg animated feature last November, and that "3d" felt like nothing compared to the Coraline 3D experience. If you can see it in that format, it is truly like nothing else(Perhaps due to the fact that the objects in the film are real, as opposed to computer generated, giving it more depth)

The film opens with reminded me of something straight out of The Brothers Quay or a Jan Svankmajer film. It has that very darkly rich ornate and organic look, the kind of avant garde stop motion of a 90's Tool video. Now I had not been too familiar with Gaiman's original book, but as a stand alone journey Coraline works wonders. It has that almost David Lynchian sort of dream language and logic, perfectly woven into the narrative for some truly "WTF" moments. One thing that really captured my attention right away besides the visuals was the music and score, which was composed by Bruno Coulais.
some really mesmerizing , almost French sounding numbers as well. While it's not the kind of memorable quirky macabre tunes from Nightmare Before Christmas, it has a magic all its own. There's even a They Might Be Giants song the father of Coraline sings.

There's been a long tradition of darkly comic or bizarre films where the protagonist discovers
a small door in a building which contains a portal to another world. This was the plot of Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. Other films like Jan Svankmajer's Alice and The Neverending Story swirl around this concept(I won't mention the forgettable kid's films thatv'e played with that concept in recent years), and Coraline really makes quite a lush narrative with it. I was sitting there, thinking "My God how did they do this all with stop motion". This has to be the longest pure stop motion feature I've seen, and I can imagine how much tedious work went into the three years of production.

As for the story, it centers around a spunky blue haired tween who moves with her parents to some converted old Victorian house in a remote part of Oregon. Her mom is the usual sort of pent up suburban neurotic, and her dad is a nebbish catalog writer married to his computer.
So what's a young girl to do? She befriends a local boy named Wybie, who gives her an old doll that looks like her. While the other neighbors are eccentric to say the least, it's her journey into another dimension(or is it?) where things start to get really strange. And thus begins a truly bizarre and unique experience, that definitely borders on the darker and unsettling side at times.