Coraline

2009 animated feature

Rating: 18/20 (Jen: 17/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 1/20)

Plot: The title character finds a tiny door in her new home, a pink apartment building. After she procures a key to the door, she's eventually able to enter a vaginal tunnel into an alternate universe where everything looks almost exactly the same but with improvements. She enjoys the new idealized world until she discovers that her alternate mother wants to take her eyes, replace them with buttons, and make her stay forever. Oh, snap!

As my faithful four-and-a-half readers have figured out, I'm a sucker for this sort of stop-animated stuff. Keep that in mind as you read below. You'll have to allow some gushing. However, winter rates and anonymous--you both need to grab this one!

First off, this isn't a movie for children. I should have done my research. The nightmare imagery squeezed its way into my dreams, which generally I don't even remember, and I know my daughters went to bed creeped out. This is an emo-folktale with the look of Selick's Nightmare before Christmas and with an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland vibe. Perhaps lumping it with any other work of art is unfair though because Coraline is a completely unique experience. I know I could watch a "making of" feature on the dvd (if there is one) to get my answers, but I'm not sure how portions of this are even animated. It's stop-animated like Nightmare or James and the Giant Peach (or the recent Tom Thumb movie I watched which the memory of, I'm sad to say, now looks like shit in comparison), but there are textures, movements, backgrounds, and shades that almost have to be CGI. Regardless, it's a mind-boggling feast for the eyeballs. There are scenes (a garden in the "other" world, a choreographed mice dance, etc.) where I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There are colors the animators use that don't actually exist anywhere outside of this movie. There are details (slightly wavering chandeliers, movements in snow globes) where you can see the amount of love that went into creating this world and these characters. There's such a complexity to the movements, several characters making a myriad of movements in the foregrounds and backgrounds, that really raise the bar with stop-animation. There's a richness or a depth to the settings that makes you want to rewind certain scenes to watch them again to make sure you've soaked it all in. Accuse me of hyperbolizing all you want, but this is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. The characters are crafted similarly those in Nightmare Before Christmas except they look more human and there's a lot less of that grotesque exaggeration, the Russian guy's tiny legs and the enormous bosoms of one of the actresses being exceptions. Where the puppetry outshines Nightmare and James and the Giant Peach is in the facial expressions. Although there is some choppiness (especially in the early scenes) when characters rapidly change their expressions, the sheer amount of expressions the characters have is amazing. They must have had thousands of puppet heads to use. The narrative, although at times derivative in one of those can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it ways, stays fresh and unpredictable, and there's a tidy little life lesson for children even though they'll be too scared to figure out what it is. This is a dark and intelligent movie, a movie that doesn't feel the need to sprinkle in some humor or pop culture references to lighten the load which I think will help give this cult favorite status for a very long time. I didn't have high expectations for this even though I really like Nightmare Before Christmas (partially for reasons that have nothing to do with how good of a movie it is). The mediocre James and the Giant Peach and that Monkeybones movie and Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride had me anticipating something that wasn't going to be any more than OK. But unhinged, imaginative, and exhilarating, this is the most excited I've been while watching an animated movie since The Triplets of Belleville, and I'm looking forward to see it again soon. Hell, I might even buy it.