Column:
'Coraline' lacks in plot, excels visually
Published Feb. 9, 2009
It's no surprise to this generation, raised on "The Nightmare before Christmas," that "Coraline," Henry Selick's new stop-motion film, features the same trademark spindly and self-consciously dark aesthetic that has adjusted so well to the Hot Topic hooded-sweatshirt market. The surprise is that the film is burdened by it.
"Coraline" begins as an unforgettable look into the desires of a young girl and ends as a road trip into the Tim Burton-esque world of vaguely frightening monsters. But the result, however flawed, is still enjoyable.
The Coraline in question is a preteen recently uprooted from her school and friends when her parents move for work to an impossibly shabby old house in the middle of nowhere. The misplaced girl is mad at her parents, busy and hectoring for the move, and mad at the world around her for not being home. One night, just as she's falling asleep, Coraline discovers a wallpapered-off portal that leads to an alternate world that revolves around her.
Up to this point, Coraline is mostly alone. Her parents are so busy their clay figures, hunched and stiff, only seem comfortable staring into a computer and most of the neighbors are well past retirement age. What happens is reminiscent of kid classics, such as "My Neighbor Totoro." Coraline just walks around with no particular goals in mind and observes the strange world around her. These early sequences reveal a lot about the way she sees things. She imagines the world as cold and disinterested toward her as she is toward it.
When she goes through the portal it makes sense her ideal world is one in which her parents sing songs about her and cook elaborate chicken dinners in her honor. Even her neighbors get in on the act, in two remarkably inventive scenes featuring an enormous theater beneath her house and a troupe of trained circus mice spelling out her name. The well-meaning neighbor boy, who Coraline thinks talks a little too much, even has his mouth sewn shut. In this world, he functions as her mute companion, accompanying her wordlessly on errands she ran on her own in the real world.
But the other world is relentless, faceless and eyeless. Everyone has had their eyes replaced with buttons. Perfection begins to bog her down, and Coraline, heretofore unpleasant in the real world, starts to see a different side of her real, flawed parents.
Visually, of course, this is a beautiful movie. Selick, who also made "James and the Giant Peach," sets up a surprisingly differentiated world inside the real house and its fantastic counterpart, constructing art-deco theaters and creepy gardens with equal skill. The human characters here are more emotive and move more smoothly than in previous clay-mation efforts. The process is only really noticeable when something is flowing or falling.
But the film bogs down in the second half when a spider-lady villain comes in and some vague, unidentifiable mythology is handed down to explain the portal and Coraline's trips through it. All movies need an antagonist, but they don't need a villain. After Coraline's strange trip through the first act, the final chase, with her real parents' freedom at stake, was a flashy disappointment.