SLJ Review: Coraline the Movie
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Kent Turner -- School Library Journal, 02/05/2009
This must be Neil Gaiman’s lucky year. Last month, his novel The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2008) nabbed the Newbery Medal, the top prize in children’s literature. And this week marks the film release of his first children’s novel, Coraline (HarperCollins, 2002). Directed by writer-director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) with an imagination that matches Gaiman’s Grimm-gothic prose, Coraline is the first film to feature stereoscopic 3-D animation—and it’s visually extraordinary.
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| Coraline travels through a portal between worlds. All photos: Laika, Inc. 2008© |
True to Gaiman’s original tale, there’s a crazy, disheveled old coot that lives on the top floor, Mr. Bobinsky, the so-called master of ceremonies of a mouse circus, and a pair of neighboring eccentrics, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, who offer Coraline decades-old hard candy and an insightful tea-leaf reading. (A poster of Miss Forcible in King Leer hangs on a wall beneath where the two have stuffed and mounted their deceased schnauzers.)
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| Coraline and her Other Mother |
Selick wisely lets the pixels run rampant, and even the ordinary world looks trippy and surreal. Coraline has a helmet of blue hair; the Other Mother is all angles; and Mr. Bobinsky, Miss Spink, and Miss Forcible are corpulent grotesqueries. From beginning to end, the film looks like a live-action diorama. In fact, it would be hard to imagine the movie without its striking 3-D animation—the characters look like puppets without strings, with an occasional object or two jabbing out of the screen. Because Selick remains true to the novel’s spirit, the film rises far above being a mere novelty.
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| Miss Spink and Miss Forcible |
Most importantly, Selick doesn’t sugarcoat the story. There’s still no place like home, even if your parents are narcissists. And if the thought of wearing those special 3-D glasses is giving you a headache, the sights you’ll see will more than make up for any discomfort.
Directed by Henry Selick
100 min.
Rated PG
All photos: LAIKA, Inc.
