Psycho's Movie Reviews #133: Coraline (2009)

Coraline is a 2009 American stop-motion animated dark fantasy film written and directed by Henry Selick and based on Neil Gaiman's novella of the same name. Produced by Laika as the studio's first feature film, it features the voice talents of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith David, John Hodgman, Robert Bailey Jr., and Ian McShane. The film tells the story of its titular character discovering an idealized parallel universe behind a secret door in her new home, unaware that it contains a dark and sinister secret.

The film was theatrically released in the United States on February 6, 2009 by Focus Features after a world premiere at the Portland International Film Festival, and was met with generally positive reviews from critics. The film grossed $16.85 million during its opening weekend, ranking third at the box office, and by the end of its run had grossed over $124 million worldwide, making it the third highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time after Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The film won Annie Awards for Best Music in an Animated Feature Production, Best Character Design in an Animated Feature Production and Best Production Design in an Animated Feature Production, and received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Plot

Neglected by her workaholic parents, Coraline Jones struggles to adapt to her new life in the Pink Palace Apartments in Ashland, Oregon. She meets the landlady's grandson, Wyborne "Wybie" Lovat, and a stray black cat. Later, Wybie retrieves a button-eyed ragdoll that eerily resembles Coraline from his grandmother's trunk and gives it to her. The doll guides Coraline to a small door in the apartment's living room that has a bricked up wall behind it.

That night, a mouse wakes Coraline up and guides her to the door, which is now a portal leading to a parallel universe that resembles the real world. Coraline then meets her Other Mother and Father, button-eyed doppelgängers of her parents who appear more attentive and caring. She returns home the next morning, where Wybie recounts the disappearance of his great aunt. Coraline's neighbours, Sergei Alexander Bobinsky, an eccentric Chernobyl liquidator-turned-gymnast who owns a mouse circus, and retired burlesque actresses April Spink and Miriam Forcible, cryptically warn her about imminent danger.

Despite the warnings, Coraline visits the Other World twice more. There, she, accompanied by the mute Other Wybie, is entertained by the dimension's doppelgängers of her neighbors and meets the cat, who has the abilities to traverse between the real world and the Other World and speak in the latter. On the third visit, the Other Mother offers Coraline the opportunity to stay in the Other World permanently, in exchange for having buttons sewn over her eyes. Horrified, Coraline tries to escape back to her world, but the Other Mother prevents her from doing so and imprisons her in a room behind a mirror. There, she meets the ghosts of the Other Mother's victims, one of them being Wybie's great aunt, who all call her the Beldam. They recount how the Beldam used the ragdoll, each time designed after the victim in question, to spy on them and lure them into the Other World. After they accepted the Beldam's offer of having buttons sewn over their eyes, she robbed them of their souls. The ghosts tell Coraline that the only way they can be freed is by retrieving the essences of the souls, which the Beldam has hidden throughout the Other World. After Coraline promises to do so, she is rescued by the Other Wybie, who helps her return home.

Upon her return, Coraline discovers that the Beldam has kidnapped her parents, forcing her to return to the Other World. Accompanied by the cat, Coraline proposes a game to the Beldam: if she can find her parents and the essences of her past victims' souls, they will all go free; if not, she will finally accept the Beldam's offer. The Beldam agrees and Coraline searches for the souls' essences, during which she discovers that the Beldam murdered the Other Wybie for his defiance. As she finds each of the soul's essences, parts of the Other World turn lifeless, leading to the entire dimension, except for the living room, eventually disintegrating.

Coraline then encounters the Beldam in her true arachnid-like form. One of the ghosts tell Coraline that the Beldam will not honour their bargain. Using this advice, Coraline tricks the Beldam into opening the door to the real world by claiming that her parents are behind it. After Coraline distracts the Beldam by throwing the cat at her and rescues her parents, who are trapped in a snow globe. Coraline narrowly escapes through the door with the Beldam in pursuit and severs her right hand with it in the process.

Back home, Coraline reunites with her parents, who have forgotten about their capture. That night, the ghosts appear in Coraline's dream and thank her for freeing them, but warn her that the Beldam is still after the key needed to unlock the door. Coraline decides to drop the key down an old well, but the Beldam's severed hand attacks her. Wybie soon arrives and, after a struggle, destroys the hand by dropping a large rock on it. The duo then toss the key and the hand's remnants into the well and seal it. The next day, Coraline and her parents host a party for their neighbours, including Wybie's grandmother, whom Coraline and Wybie prepare to tell her about her missing sister's fate.

Production

Director Henry Selick met author Neil Gaiman just as Gaiman was finishing the novel Coraline, and given that Gaiman was a fan of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, he invited him to make a possible film adaptation. As Selick thought a direct adaptation would lead to "maybe a 47-minute movie", his screenplay had some expansions, such as the creation of Wybie, who was not present in the original novel. When looking for a design away from that of most animation, Selick discovered the work of Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi and invited him to become the concept artist. One of Uesugi's biggest influences was on the color palette, which was muted in reality and more colorful in the Other World, similar to The Wizard of Oz. Uesugi declared that "at the beginning, it was supposed to be a small project over a few weeks to simply create characters; however, I ended up working on the project for over a year, eventually designing sets and backgrounds, on top of drawing the basic images for the story to be built upon."

Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m2) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon. The stage was divided into 50 lots, which played host to nearly 150 sets. Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week. To capture stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.

Every object on screen was made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions, and the characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own, which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.

At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG), directed by Dan Casey, and more than 250 technicians and designers. One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair. The clothes also simulated wear using paint and a file.

Music

The soundtrack for Coraline features songs composed by French composer Bruno Coulais, with one ("Other Father Song") by They Might Be Giants. The Other Father's singing voice is provided by John Linnell, one of the singers from the band. They had initially written 10 songs for the film; when a melancholy tone was decided, all but one were cut. Coulais' score was performed by the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra and features choral pieces sung by the Children's Choir of Nice in a nonsense language. Selick mentions that the main soloist, "a young girl you hear singing in several parts of the film," is coincidentally named Coraline. Coraline won Coulais the 2009 Annie Award for best score for an animated feature.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Coraline was theatrically released on February 6, 2009.

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United States on July 21, 2009, by Universal Studios Home Entertainment. A 3-D version comes with four sets of 3-D glasses—specifically the green-magenta anaglyph image. Coraline was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2009. A 3-D version of the film was also released on a 2-Disc Collector's Edition. The DVD opened to first week sales of 1,036,845 and over $19 million in revenue. Total sales stand at over 2.6 million units and over $45 million in revenue. A two-disc Blu-ray 3D set, which includes a stereoscopic 3D on the first disc and an anaglyph 3D image, was released in 2011. A new edition from Shout! Factory under license from Universal was released on August 31, 2021.

The website for Coraline involves an interactive exploration game where the player can scroll through Coraline's world. It won the 2009 Webby Award for "Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics", both by the people and the Webby organization. It was also nominated for the Webby "Movie and Film" category. On June 16, 2008, D3 Publisher announced the release of a video game based on the film. It was developed by Papaya Studio for the Wii and PlayStation 2 and by Art Co. for Nintendo DS. It was released on January 27, 2009, close to the film's theatrical release. The soundtrack was released digitally February 3, 2009, by E1 Music, and in stores on February 24, 2009.

On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 270 reviews, with an average rating of 7.80/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "With its vivid stop-motion animation combined with Neil Gaiman's imaginative story, Coraline is a film that's both visually stunning and wondrously entertaining." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100 based on reviews from 38 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".

Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, calling it "a beautiful film about several nasty people", as well as "nightmare fodder for children, however brave, under a certain age. "David Edelstein said the film is "a bona fide fairy tale" that needed a "touch less entrancement and a touch more... story." A. O. Scott of The New York Times called the film "exquisitely realized," with a "slower pace and a more contemplative tone than the novel. It is certainly exciting, but rather than race through ever noisier set pieces toward a hectic climax in the manner of so much animation aimed at kids, Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling."

According to Paul Dergarabedian, a film business analyst with Media by Numbers, for the film to succeed it needed a box office comparable to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which had grossed $16 million its opening weekend and ended up making more than $192 million worldwide; prior to the film's release, Dergarabedian thought Laika Studios "should be really pleased" were Coraline to make $10 million in its opening weekend. In its US opening weekend, the film grossed $16.85 million, ranking third at the box office. It made $15 million during its second weekend, bringing its U.S. total up to $35.6 million, $25.5 million of which came from 3D presentations. As of November 2009, the film has grossed $75,286,229 in the United States and Canada and $49,310,169 in other territories, for a total of $124,596,398 worldwide.

Budget $60 million

Box office $124.6 million

My Review

It's important that films are still being made with stop-motion animation, the all-encompassing and painstaking art that involves hundreds of animators and designers to move pieces of plastic and mold and clay and whatever second by second and frame by frame. We still have the Wallace and Gromit guys at Aardman working well, and later this year Wes Anderson, who used some stop-motion in Life Aquatic, will be releasing a stop-motion adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's not quite a dying animation form that may or may not need resuscitation like regular cell animation.

But the form also needs ideas and fresh invention and some kind of approach that keeps innovation going on with where to take any sense of fantasy and wonder up for grabs. Henry Selick, thankfully, is a master having been the director of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and he was the right and maybe only choice to give Neil Gaiman's Coraline an inventive perspective. This is a children's film that is not limited for its audience. Kids will eat it up and mostly be good for it (the screening I went to had barely a disruptive peep from the under 12 tykes), but it also stirs up a sense of enchantment with older viewers like, for example, those who were kids when 'Nightmare' came out. It has some obvious comparisons to make to Alice in Wonderland and other fantasy lore, and its slight sense of familiarity in the conventional parts to the story keep it from being the animated event of the year.

But, as I said, it also provides the unexpected. For example a comparison to make which some may not pick up is that the first half of the film is akin to Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. Both films have that immensely powerful and intoxicating and just plain damn fun quality that is child-like with its main character's connection to dreams as a means of experiencing what is much more gratifying than in real life's doldrums and disappointments. This threw me off in the best way; the trailer and previews made it seem like Coraline has this ho-hum existence being in a new home in Oregon with her distracted parents and slips through the hole in the door in the wall and stays there for the whole movie. I was content with that expectation, but the facet of dreams meshing with reality- and reality itself already being strange enough as it is with its inspired and odd characters like the European trapeze artist and the two aged female performance artists with stuffed angel dogs- added a whole other dimension.

This time it becomes about this little girl Coraline's temptations of staying in this dreamworld, where her "other" parents have button-eyes and offer up constant treats and goodies and the father makes a garden around the house to look from the sky like Coraline's face, and how she has to overcome some pretty startling obstacles to get her real parents back into reality from the evil twisted version of the "other" mother... sound complicated? It's not.

This is such a whimsical movie that it's hard to describe everything that makes it so jaw-droopingly amazing. There may be a bias for those who gobble up new and crazy sights in stop-motion, and here some of it is just conventionally strange like the next-door neighbor boy of Coraline's with the frizzy hair and half-bike-half-motorcycle, or the trapeze artist voiced by Ian McShane with a propensity to feed his kangaroo mice (in the 'dream' side of things of course, one of my personal favorites of any movie in years), or the dead ghost children the evil skeletal mother keeps locked away who need their real eyes back. The story proposes nightmarish visions for children but nothing so shocking as to send them crying down the aisles... or maybe so depending on their temperaments (I really jumped in my seat from some shocks Selick delivered), and it thrills precisely because it doesn't pander to a child's imagination.

It's a film that understands how dreams work, and how intoxicating they can get, and why for perhaps all the dangerous reasons it's essential to have them. It also reminds us why to keep little doors that are supposedly bricked-up to stay that way. 9.5/10!!!