Coraline

In continuation with scary animated movies, I will look at a movie that got my family back to going to the theater after a whole year of not going. I’m not kidding, all throughout the year of 2008, I hadn’t gone to the theater, but thanks to this film, we got back to going to the theater.  I’m talking about none other than the 2009 film, “Coraline.”

What was the target audience for this film? I’m not sure what would be the right age to show kids this, but it’s definitely not a movie for Elementary School kids. Look, with the advent of all these websites where people post all sorts of videos, everyone has seen just about all types of videos. However, “Coraline” is scary because of the story it tells, which doesn’t happen very often. Not that many movies take us on some sort of a Haunted Mansion type of a ride like this one does.

Coraline Jones, voiced by the actress who started her career out from when she was a child, Dakota Fanning, is not the typical kid we’ve seen. She has some sort of a stuck-up behavior about herself and doesn’t really have any friends. What’s also strange is that the people she encounters are not really the people we meet every day, which is about her going through a painted door in her house that takes her to another place where she has parents who are exactly like her own, except they have buttons sewn over their eyes. She later becomes stuck to stay forever in this other place permanently.

We can sympathize with Coraline on her parental issues because her parents aren’t the best. They’re constantly working, arguing and don’t really give her the attention that a kid requires. They don’t even make eye contact or acknowledge when she has entered in a room. You can’t really blame her when she finds out about her Other Mother and Other Father who are on the other side waiting for her to give her all the attention that parents need to give children. The only thing for her to do, if she wants to stay there forever, is to sew the buttons over her eyes.

Roger Ebert noted in his review, “"Coraline" is the new film by Henry Selick, who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) and again combines his mastery of stop-motion and other animation with 3-D. The 3-D creates a gloomier image (take off the glasses and the screen is bright), but then this is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.” Believe it or not, I actually saw this film in 3D.

Ebert continued, “The ideal audience for this film would be admirers of film art itself, assuming such people exist. Selick creates an entirely original look and feel, uses the freedom of animation to elongate his characters into skeletal spectres looming over poor Coraline.” Her new friend is Wybie, voiced by Robert Bailey Jr., whose birth name is Wyborn, which Coraline realizes why he was given that name.

The Other Mother and Father, voiced by Teri Hatcher and former contributor on “The Daily Show” with now his own podcast, John Hodgman, (they both also voice Father and Mother) want to keep Coraline with them by forcing the buttons over her eyes. Their house, which is Coraline’s, has two old broads in the basement, voiced by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, who look like they were previously stage show actresses for really disturbing shows. The old man who lives upstairs is Mr. Bobinsky, voiced by Ian McShane, who must have also been a stage show actor who has trained a field of mice. One of the rooms in the house has giant insects living in them.

With all honesty, I don’t really know how the 3D really helped this movie out. I can’t really say it was noticeable, seeing that it was not really there all the time. If anyone was frightened by the way this movie looked through the trailers and previews, may give this movie a pass.

Sure, this may be something that people will want to see other than the light-hearted animated films that have been released a lot over the years. However, this may be a little too dark and insane for people to watch.

However, the look of the film was what really helped the movie out for me. I really liked how the animators made this movie and gave it such a nice drawing on it, despite the fact that was mainly done all through computers. I feel like that is basically what people really loved about this movie and didn’t really got into the story, but just loved how it was made.

I won’t lie. I was scared by this film as well. If you want to watch this film, be warned, this is really scary. Watch it alone if you want, but this isn’t really a family movie for all of you to see. However, still check it out because it’s definitely a movie for Halloween. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next entry in “Halloween Month.”