His counterpoint is the Other Father – a smoke jacket wearing, piano playing hipster, who bashes out They Might Be Giants micro-pop, and rides around his psychedelic garden on a mechanical insect-wagon. This results in some wonderful moments of expressionism and characterisation, such as Coraline’s bleary-eyed, crane-necked real father, looking like a Ronald Searle or Gerald Scarfe satirical figure come to life. In the cinema, each scene bursts with creative energy, as Selick balances his multiple design influences and flights of kooky fancy. In adapting the work for the screen, Selick has expanded and warped Gaiman’s story, which very much divided the fantastical and the mundane sides of Coraline’s journey.
Coraline (Dakota Fanning) must make her own entertainment, as her mother and father (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are both distracted, typing away on their computers at work on a gardening catalogue.Ĭrucially, the film looks both beautiful and surreal. Instead, the audience is introduced to the title character as she adjusts to life in a new house with her writer parents.
Coraline, the new stop-motion 3D film from director-artisan Henry Selick, bucks this trend with admirable, awesome skill.Īdapted from the original novel by author and geek icon Neil Gaiman, Coraline starts slowly and gracefully, impressively shying away from relying on early peaks and other attention-grabbing stunts. Not to tie oddity with inspiration, but for all their well-crafted charm and brilliance, modern family classics such as Toy Story, or even Wall-E peddle a mundane sort of fantasy, lacking the expressive weirdness found in some of the best children’s literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. Today’s big successes – the Pixars, the Harry Potters – deliver broad chuckles, wide-canvas thrills and eye-popping visuals, yet in terms of depth, subtlety and pure imagination come up a little short. The grotesque is something you really don’t see in many children’s films.
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