Director: Henry Selick
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher & Keith David (voices of)
A very impressive stop-motion animated film from the director of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas adapting the novel by Neil Gaiman. Charming, funny with beautiful visuals, the film should entertain children and adults alike.
Sixteen years after bringing the stories and imagination of director Tim Burton to life in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Henry Selick adapts Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline for the cinema screen. Despite having some limited success with an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach in 1996 and the critical and commercial failure of Selick’s live-action/stop motion hybrid Monkeybone in 2001, it might have seemed that Selick owed more to Tim Burton for the success of The Nightmare Before Christmas than on his own skills as a director. Now, with Coraline, Selick is back and demonstrates he is more than just a skilled stop motion animator but sheds the influence of Tim Burton and proves he is an adept filmmaker himself showing a strong grasp of storytelling and an impressive visual style of his own that will still entertain fans of Burton but feeling more fresh and original.
Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning), is a young girl relocated to a new home in Ashland, Oregon with her botanist parents. Away from her friends, living in a secluded house with unusual neighbors and parents who are too busy to find time for her, Coraline goes exploring. What she finds is a hidden door that leads her to an alternate home where her parents and neighbors are warm and exciting people, where imagination thrives though where everyone has buttons for eyes. Initially lured in by the warmth and charm of her “other” mother and father and their home, Coraline soon sees the cost when she is asked to stay and replace her own eyes for buttons. With a sinister side revealed to her other mother and her world, Coraline must find her way home and also save her real parents. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, the author of Neverwhere, Stardust and the Sandman graphic novels, Coraline is a tale in the fashion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where a young girl finds a wonderful fantasy world that soon becomes a nightmare. At times quite scary and frequently funny (featuring some almost-inappropriate yet delightfully bawdy humor involving two elderly actresses living in the apartment below Coraline’s), Coraline is a fairytale in a classic sense. Confronting fears in a mature manner that does not underestimate the abilities of children to understand and enjoy the story’s message whilst also allowing Selick to let loose with a beautifully realized fantasy world that will delight audiences of all ages (a sequence in the garden of the other world is a highlight).
Selick also casts Coraline with some strong voice talent. Dakota Fanning voices Coraline herself, giving Coraline the intelligence and strength the character requires to face overwhelming odds and defeat them whilst Teri Hatcher (TV’s Desperate Housewives) voices both Coraline’s actual and “other” mothers impressively, with the “other” mother particularly well as she veers from warm and loving to frightening and evil. With talented actors voicing the roles of Coraline’s neighbors like Ian McShane (TV’s Deadwood and Lovejoy) as a Russian gymnast, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French as an elderly of former actresses and Keith David’s gravelly voice bringing the neighborhood cat to life within the fantasy world, Coraline has a strong crop of supporting performances to rely upon.
Overall, Coraline is very entertaining. Smart, funny, well performed and with some stunning visuals, Coraline is a classic family film in the making and proof that Selick is capable of directing as well as animating. An excellent film for any age.
Rating: 4/5
