Coraline 3D - A Nightmare After Christmas
Children have an odd knack for getting lost.
Often times, it's because they want to.
This is the case for Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), the young heroine of Henry Selick's Coraline.
Adapted from the 2002 sensational fantasy/horror novella by Neil Gaiman, Coraline is a miracle in stop-motion animation.
Selick, who animated A Nightmare Before Christmas for Tim Burton, worked with LAIKA Entertainment House for 3 years, breathing life into thousands of handcrafted puppets and creating dream/nightmare landscapes that waver between kid stuff and creepy, mature entertainment.
A dazzling 3D treatment is the way to go for those lucky enough to have $12 to spend on a movie ticket and access to a theater that offers this burgeoning medium.
A warning: if you do see this film in 3D, your eyes will be spoiled, and you'll never settle for two dimensions again.
Coraline has just moved into The Pink Palace (just one of many veiled adult allusions in the film), a three-story Victorian mansion recalling a cake-like version of the Deetz house in Beetlejuice.
Her parents, plant catalogue writers, are too busy working to even unpack, much less pay attention to their lonely daughter.
Frustrated, Coraline relies on her young imagination and exploratory tendencies to fill the rainy hours indoors and out of her new, eccentric surroundings.
She begrudgingly befriends a mischievous boy, Wybie (short for Wyborn), and his feral, mangy cat.
Wybie's grandmother owns The Pink Palace from afar and is constantly calling him home for fear that he'll be in danger.
Disbelieving, as kids do, any hints of ambiguous 'danger,' Coraline goes about meeting the odd tenants of the other two apartments in The Pink Palace.
The basement dwellers are two British old maids who are former stars of the stage.
The impossibly busty Miss Forcible and the gimp-legged Miss Spink are hilariously voiced by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame.
The two women relish their pack of Scottish Terriers, enough so that they have each one stuffed once it passes on.
Equally as strange is the upstairs neighbor, Mr.
Bobinski (Ian McShane of Deadwood), a Russian acrobat who is training a mouse circus that isn't quite ready to show yet.
Eventually, even the oddities of her daily surroundings aren't enough to appease Coraline's thirst for distraction.
Here, the film shifts gears from innocent child musings to something sinisterly amiss when Coraline finds a small secret door in the living room.
At first, the hidden passage is bricked up, but when Coraline falls asleep later that night, mice, presumably from Bobinsky's circus, waken her and lead her back to the secret door, which now reveals a long purple tunnel.
There's no apprehension as Coraline shuffles down the intestinal chute and emerges in an alternate reality where life is opposite, and seemingly improved.
On this eerily bizarre other side, her Other Parents are extremely attentive and charismatic.
Wybie is comfortably mute, but his cat can speak.
Bobinski's mouse circus is a great success.
Misses Forcible and Spink lithely put on an astounding stage performance, mixing Shakespeare with Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (animated pasties, anyone?).
Initially, the only thing off-putting is that everyone here has dead, black buttons for eyes.
Somewhat predictably, the doting affections of her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) become smothering.
The subtleties of a child's relationship with their parents are the root of what becomes a nightmare for Coraline.
Other Mother is really The Beldam, a monstrous spider-woman who is intent on building a doll collection out of any child's soul she can get her long spindly fingers on.
The film builds speed towards a videogame-like puzzle that Coraline must solve in order to save her kidnapped Real Parents and free the souls of The Beldam's former child victims.
John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" arguably inspired not only the name 'The Beldam', but also the motif of attractive femininity used for the sake of merciless entrapment.
Coraline, so needy of attention in the real world, must conquer mythic elements of love-induced imprisonment.
She is a heroine beyond her years.
More than just a young-adult fantasy and adventure film, Coraline is a crossover to nearly every genre and age group, and is sure to appeal to an enormous audience.
If you have the option of seeing this film in digital 3D, go right now.
Your eyes will thank you.
Often times, it's because they want to.
This is the case for Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), the young heroine of Henry Selick's Coraline.
Adapted from the 2002 sensational fantasy/horror novella by Neil Gaiman, Coraline is a miracle in stop-motion animation.
Selick, who animated A Nightmare Before Christmas for Tim Burton, worked with LAIKA Entertainment House for 3 years, breathing life into thousands of handcrafted puppets and creating dream/nightmare landscapes that waver between kid stuff and creepy, mature entertainment.
A dazzling 3D treatment is the way to go for those lucky enough to have $12 to spend on a movie ticket and access to a theater that offers this burgeoning medium.
A warning: if you do see this film in 3D, your eyes will be spoiled, and you'll never settle for two dimensions again.
Coraline has just moved into The Pink Palace (just one of many veiled adult allusions in the film), a three-story Victorian mansion recalling a cake-like version of the Deetz house in Beetlejuice.
Her parents, plant catalogue writers, are too busy working to even unpack, much less pay attention to their lonely daughter.
Frustrated, Coraline relies on her young imagination and exploratory tendencies to fill the rainy hours indoors and out of her new, eccentric surroundings.
She begrudgingly befriends a mischievous boy, Wybie (short for Wyborn), and his feral, mangy cat.
Wybie's grandmother owns The Pink Palace from afar and is constantly calling him home for fear that he'll be in danger.
Disbelieving, as kids do, any hints of ambiguous 'danger,' Coraline goes about meeting the odd tenants of the other two apartments in The Pink Palace.
The basement dwellers are two British old maids who are former stars of the stage.
The impossibly busty Miss Forcible and the gimp-legged Miss Spink are hilariously voiced by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame.
The two women relish their pack of Scottish Terriers, enough so that they have each one stuffed once it passes on.
Equally as strange is the upstairs neighbor, Mr.
Bobinski (Ian McShane of Deadwood), a Russian acrobat who is training a mouse circus that isn't quite ready to show yet.
Eventually, even the oddities of her daily surroundings aren't enough to appease Coraline's thirst for distraction.
Here, the film shifts gears from innocent child musings to something sinisterly amiss when Coraline finds a small secret door in the living room.
At first, the hidden passage is bricked up, but when Coraline falls asleep later that night, mice, presumably from Bobinsky's circus, waken her and lead her back to the secret door, which now reveals a long purple tunnel.
There's no apprehension as Coraline shuffles down the intestinal chute and emerges in an alternate reality where life is opposite, and seemingly improved.
On this eerily bizarre other side, her Other Parents are extremely attentive and charismatic.
Wybie is comfortably mute, but his cat can speak.
Bobinski's mouse circus is a great success.
Misses Forcible and Spink lithely put on an astounding stage performance, mixing Shakespeare with Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (animated pasties, anyone?).
Initially, the only thing off-putting is that everyone here has dead, black buttons for eyes.
Somewhat predictably, the doting affections of her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) become smothering.
The subtleties of a child's relationship with their parents are the root of what becomes a nightmare for Coraline.
Other Mother is really The Beldam, a monstrous spider-woman who is intent on building a doll collection out of any child's soul she can get her long spindly fingers on.
The film builds speed towards a videogame-like puzzle that Coraline must solve in order to save her kidnapped Real Parents and free the souls of The Beldam's former child victims.
John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" arguably inspired not only the name 'The Beldam', but also the motif of attractive femininity used for the sake of merciless entrapment.
Coraline, so needy of attention in the real world, must conquer mythic elements of love-induced imprisonment.
She is a heroine beyond her years.
More than just a young-adult fantasy and adventure film, Coraline is a crossover to nearly every genre and age group, and is sure to appeal to an enormous audience.
If you have the option of seeing this film in digital 3D, go right now.
Your eyes will thank you.
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