Illustration titled "The Prince Lets Out the Hairy Man" by Henry Justice Ford, from the Crimson Fairy Book, 1903
So I saw Coraline, the new Henry Selick stop-motion movie, this weekend. Based on the novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman, the movie is about a little girl who is frustrated by feelings of isolation from her parents and enters a fantasy world of perfect parents where things turn out to be much less than perfect. I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman's work for quite a while, and although I don't think he's currently making the best and freshest work of his career, I'm glad that it is finally making him very wealthy. He deserves it. Coraline works because Henry Selick understands the strengths of Gaiman's storytelling style and matches it with spot-on visuals. The structure of Coraline follows a traditional fairy tale plot (like many of Gaiman's stories), focusing on a protagonist that visits a set of eccentric characters as part of a quest and must solve puzzles and riddles along the way. This kind of story works well with Selick's own strengths, allowing him to flesh out a small set of fantastical locales and their goofy inhabitants.
I should mention that I saw the 3D version of Coraline, and it was my first experience with the new 3D technology. The smoothness of the movement of objects through the planes of depth was impressive, although at times it seemed like the stop-motion was jerkier as a result. I didn't find the 3D effects distracting, but they weren't really a value-add for me either - I think I would have enjoyed the movie just as much without them. At the movie's end, some children in the theater complained to their parents that Coraline was not as good as Journey to the Center of the Earth because it didn't have enough moments of objects rushing toward you in 3D. If this kind of comparison is what 3D gets us, maybe we'd be better off without it.
Overall, I have few complaints about the movie itself. It moves along at a brisk pace, and the voice acting is quite good. I thought Dakota Fanning's line readings were a little rough at first, but it didn't bother me after the first few scenes. The visuals are great, and several of the movie's big set-pieces are as good as anything in Nightmare Before Christmas. The ending is not as sharply executed as it could be, but this is a problem I remember having with the novella as well. My biggest complaint is with a character that was added to the movie that was not in the novella at all. I read Coraline quite a while ago and feel no great loyalty to the source material, but the addition of a boy Coraline's age (Wybie) doesn't add anything to the story, and he is easily the most poorly executed part of the movie. Everything about his scenes seems tacked on awkwardly, and his contribution to the movie's climax isn't particularly good either. It makes me wonder why Selick would want to add a "friend" character to a story that is clearly about a child who feels isolated in a world of adults.
Other than the Wybie character, my only other problem with the film was that the music was neither here nor there - the one song by They Might Be Giants stands out in a not-good way because the rest of the songs are very faceless. A stage adaptation of Coraline is in the works and will be opening in New York in May, with music by the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt. It would have been nice if the film had been able to use this music instead - I am sure it would have been a better fit. The songs of Merritt's bubblegum-goth "band" the Gothic Archies would have fit the Coraline movie very well. Overall, though, I think that it's a good family movie that is scary enough for kids to be memorable without being traumatizing, and the story and visuals are fun for grown-ups as well.
"Ever Falls the Twilight" by the Gothic Archies
2 comments:
I just saw some interview with Selick where he said "Wybie" (and Other Wybie) exist so Coraline has someone to talk to in certain scenes. Apparently it was either that or a narrator. He also said there were a bunch of TMBG songs that got cut when the movie's tone got darker.
Given the choice, I think a well-done narration would have worked better and been truer to the feel of the story. And would've involved fewer sets of stupid novelty goggles.
I didn't know about the other TMBG songs - I think it would have been nice if they'd left them in for cohesion's sake. It was kind of cool how John Hodgman's voice is almost identical to John Linnell's.
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