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Coraline
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Coraline
Stop-Motion Horror Fantasy / English / 2009
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I was somewhat bemused the first time I saw Coraline. I want to see it again and figure out why. Reassessment time.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Chicken, Pizza, otherthingsIwon'tcountcausethey'renotactuallyrealand/orthey'reusedbyevilcharacters, CORALINE is a bit odd for me.
I'm not gonna go OMG HENRY SELICK IS TE BEST HE CAN DO NO WRONG OMGRRRRRR, no, but I will say that I was and still am wildly impressed by the visuals.
Coraline is not only significantly higher quality animation than Nightmare Before Christmas; using more frames, cleaner base materials (so you can get those seamless closeups), and introducing more nuanced human gestures into the individual characters, the animation is incredible.
Not only that, but I think the visual design of everything is great too.
Okay, maybe not everything I mean, the old man in the attic is pretty unattractive and the whole of the movie has various moments of... shall we say TOO macabre... but overall besides I think it's fantastic. And excellent blend of cartoony, but still very real.
The lighting, the colors, the button motif which begets the sowing motif which begets the spider motif, it all really creates a sense of...
...it's hard to describe. It's kinda like those kid's book horror stories with their themes of exploration and wanting something better?
Wait.
****. I totally forgot this was actually adapted from a book.
Well that EXPLAINS quite a bit and hey, kudos for managing to get that vague sense of what those kind of stories are like and making a movie out of them, BUUUUUUUUT I haven't actually read the book so I can't speak for it's quality as an adaption.
What I can say is that Coraline still loses me somewhere along the line and it's difficult to nail down why.
Perhaps those kinds of books just never really clicked with me? The premise is really interesting, no doubt, more than enough for me to want to check it out, but I think it may be a bit of misfire in it's execution.
I think maybe too much of the movie was spent on the spectacle of the thing. I mean, make no mistake it's great to look at and ****, it's not like Nightmare didn't do much of the same with an entire song titled "What's This!?", but it takes until the halfway point before Coraline's dream world becomes a nightmare and we get any serious level of deceit or intrigue.
The first half I think is divided up roughly between navel-gazing at "Oooooooh, ahhhhhhh, look at all the pretty things and awesome stuff going on! Let's spend the first 14 minutes of the movie setting up the tone before we bring in the core conflict at all! Yaaaaaaaaay." aaaaaaaaaand Coraline being a character.
Or a stereotype.
Just not anyone particularly likable.
Coraline is basically written as "Fed Up Preteen" character. She never does anything exceptionally rebellious, instead she spends the majority of her screentime moaning about what her parents won't allow her to do or making eyebrows as the hardtacked Straight Man character.
The thing about Straight Man is it exists for 1.) to serve as a viewer surrogate and 2.) for reactionary comedy.
There's very very little comedy here so the Straight Man exists solely for us to comfortably slip into as viewers.
That's okay insofar as Coraline demonstrating reasonable disgust towards general affronts like receiving a lookalike doll from the odd neighbor kid ("creepy"), but this combined with her bemoaning her own existence in the face of adversity significantly weaker than that which you'd find in say... Inside Out... is a bit of a put off.
And that's a bit of a put off that persists throughout almost the entire movie.
So we have a rather bland if unpleasant protagonist combined with a gratuitous amount of money shots combined with a multitude of scenes that feel empty if only because they exist for no other reason than to be reincorporated later combined with some bizarre plot bumps like...
Why does she only need to find 3 eyes for the ghosts if they're missing 6?
Why are their eyes symbolized by regular old knick-knacks, but literally referred to as eyes?
When was it ever agreed that the game would be over when the movie was ominously implying it was?
Ehhhh...
I'm tempted too give this one a [Meh...], but to be honest the themes and visual aesthetic go a long way for me and I can still see myself watching it again. It's by no means a bad movie and I'd say it's a more than an appropriate addition Henry Selick's resume.
I'm not gonna go OMG HENRY SELICK IS TE BEST HE CAN DO NO WRONG OMGRRRRRR, no, but I will say that I was and still am wildly impressed by the visuals.
Coraline is not only significantly higher quality animation than Nightmare Before Christmas; using more frames, cleaner base materials (so you can get those seamless closeups), and introducing more nuanced human gestures into the individual characters, the animation is incredible.
Not only that, but I think the visual design of everything is great too.
Okay, maybe not everything I mean, the old man in the attic is pretty unattractive and the whole of the movie has various moments of... shall we say TOO macabre... but overall besides I think it's fantastic. And excellent blend of cartoony, but still very real.
The lighting, the colors, the button motif which begets the sowing motif which begets the spider motif, it all really creates a sense of...
...it's hard to describe. It's kinda like those kid's book horror stories with their themes of exploration and wanting something better?
Wait.
****. I totally forgot this was actually adapted from a book.
Well that EXPLAINS quite a bit and hey, kudos for managing to get that vague sense of what those kind of stories are like and making a movie out of them, BUUUUUUUUT I haven't actually read the book so I can't speak for it's quality as an adaption.
What I can say is that Coraline still loses me somewhere along the line and it's difficult to nail down why.
Perhaps those kinds of books just never really clicked with me? The premise is really interesting, no doubt, more than enough for me to want to check it out, but I think it may be a bit of misfire in it's execution.
I think maybe too much of the movie was spent on the spectacle of the thing. I mean, make no mistake it's great to look at and ****, it's not like Nightmare didn't do much of the same with an entire song titled "What's This!?", but it takes until the halfway point before Coraline's dream world becomes a nightmare and we get any serious level of deceit or intrigue.
The first half I think is divided up roughly between navel-gazing at "Oooooooh, ahhhhhhh, look at all the pretty things and awesome stuff going on! Let's spend the first 14 minutes of the movie setting up the tone before we bring in the core conflict at all! Yaaaaaaaaay." aaaaaaaaaand Coraline being a character.
Or a stereotype.
Just not anyone particularly likable.
Coraline is basically written as "Fed Up Preteen" character. She never does anything exceptionally rebellious, instead she spends the majority of her screentime moaning about what her parents won't allow her to do or making eyebrows as the hardtacked Straight Man character.
The thing about Straight Man is it exists for 1.) to serve as a viewer surrogate and 2.) for reactionary comedy.
There's very very little comedy here so the Straight Man exists solely for us to comfortably slip into as viewers.
That's okay insofar as Coraline demonstrating reasonable disgust towards general affronts like receiving a lookalike doll from the odd neighbor kid ("creepy"), but this combined with her bemoaning her own existence in the face of adversity significantly weaker than that which you'd find in say... Inside Out... is a bit of a put off.
And that's a bit of a put off that persists throughout almost the entire movie.
So we have a rather bland if unpleasant protagonist combined with a gratuitous amount of money shots combined with a multitude of scenes that feel empty if only because they exist for no other reason than to be reincorporated later combined with some bizarre plot bumps like...
Why does she only need to find 3 eyes for the ghosts if they're missing 6?
Why are their eyes symbolized by regular old knick-knacks, but literally referred to as eyes?
When was it ever agreed that the game would be over when the movie was ominously implying it was?
Ehhhh...
I'm tempted too give this one a [Meh...], but to be honest the themes and visual aesthetic go a long way for me and I can still see myself watching it again. It's by no means a bad movie and I'd say it's a more than an appropriate addition Henry Selick's resume.