film, eyeballs, brain

Let me get this little thing out of the way first: see it in 3-D.Yes, it’s worth the higher price for the glasses and waiting in long lines because, no pun intended, it really does add an extra dimension to the film. And what a film it is, the stuff that cartoon / comic book / fantasy geeks dream of, if only for this Neil Gaiman / Henry Selick matchup made in otaku heaven.

The movie begins with our titular heroine, Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning), moving to an old crumbly house; because of the dreary weather, I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Her parents are writers for a garden catalog – though neither seem to be particularly interested in gardening – and they spend their days at their respective computer monitors too long to have much time for their bored daughter.

And it’s when, during her idle adventures throughout the building, Coraline discovers a door – and a secret hallway, and another house, and other parents, and a whole ‘nother parallel universe of sorts – that the narrative is set into motion. For her other father (an Adrien Brody look-alike, not voiced by Brody) is now a musical composer with a psychedelically green thumb; her other mother (voiced by Teri Hatcher) is now a perfect cook, living in a too-perfect house. The only thing odd about this is how her mother looks: those are buttons that were her eyes.

Coraline has been Americanized, and in an odd way: her family is now from Michigan (Pontiac, to be exact). Only the presence of the former vaudeville performers, Misses Spink and Forcible (with the inspired voice casting of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) are what’s left of its original Englishness. I don’t necessarily think that anything was lost in translation – the Harry Potter and Narnia series, for instance, were firmly rooted in England in a way that Coraline is not – but Gaiman’s book has also been expanded in ways that seem a little off. There’s the presence of a doll, seen being sewn together in the opening credits, that needlessly introduces a confusing subplot. Connected to this is a twitchy neighbor boy riding a bike that he seems too young to be on; Barb surmised at the end of the movie that he was thrown in as a concession to the boys in the audience, and I agree.

The film is absolutely visually stunning. I can’t imagine the amount of work involved in all this stop-motion animating. (At several points I found myself saying “Whoa”, just like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.) The 3D effects are subtly done, unlike in the inferior Beowulf (coincidentally, co-written by Gaiman), with spears and boobs gratuitously flying out at the audience.

All this eye candy doesn’t detract from the plot at all, but Selick’s movie differs from Gaiman’s book in a crucial way. There’s always the overpowering sense in the Gaiman book – it’s also the reason why Hayao Miyazaki’s later films, especially Spirited Away, are so powerful – that so much is at stake. We don’t get this as much in Selick’s film, because he makes an important shift in the pacing of the narrative. Selick nicely stretches out the scenes where Coraline is slowly seduced into her other mother’s web, which is something missing from Gaiman’s book. It’s Selick’s opportunity to pull out all the stops: a bawdy vaudeville act, an enchanted garden sprouting right out of a drug-addled Fantasia, and an acrobatic mouse circus. It’s easy to see why Coraline would want to live in this wonderland forever; this is also where Coraline comes closest to the inspired lunacy of Monkeybone, Selick’s underrated 2001 dark comic fantasy about writer’s block.

But things soon get dark – quite dark, actually, and rather violent in its implications – and Coraline, with jaw clenched, now goes on an archetypal heroine’s quest. Selick uses this as an opportunity to concoct the demonic reverse of the amusement park attractions earlier. Back when it came out, I had pronounced Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas as surely “the most perverse Christmas movie ever”, and it’s this TimBurtonesque glee which fuels the creepiness of the second half. But it’s not weighted with the same import as it is in Gaiman’s book, and I’m guessing it’s because the cinematic translation of those sequences would have been too intense for younger kids. (In the book, her later encounter with her other father, and a frightening visit to an empty theater, is almost Lovecraftian.)

But Selick’s attention to the buildup, as smartly executed as it is, seems to draw attention from the core of the story, which is parental abandonment. No spoiler here, really: the parents disappear about a third of the way in Gaiman’s novella, but about half an hour before the end in Selick’s movie. This switch in the narrative has the effect of losing the momentum of Coraline’s peril.

Coraline has the classic structure and mythic underpinning of a fairy tale, and the reason why fairy tales are circulated so widely and are handed down from generation to generation and are so effective as a whole – as Bruno Bettelheim once said – is that they stir up primal fears, and allow young children to take those fears and insert them into a more comprehensible, and therefore more comforting, narrative. (It’s also what animates the best Stephen King novels, whittled down to their most basic; they’re all about being alone in the dark – or to be precise, not alone.)

It isn’t thoughts of death or dismemberment of their little selves that frighten children; it’s Grandma being digested in the belly of a wolf. Gaiman similarly makes “the monster” of Coraline seem ancient and therefore more forbidding; in the movie, she’s more of a Desperate Housewife. Selick has made a great, hugely entertaining film, but has defanged it in the process.

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