The first time I watched Coraline, I hadn’t really read any Neil Gaiman. And while I still haven’t read Coraline, I’ve read some of his other work, I’ve seen some of his work on Doctor Who, I have a pretty solid grasp of Neil Gaiman’s quirks and the stamps he puts on his work.
I feel like I should have been able to tell Coraline was one of his without having been exposed to him yet. Few things are more distilled essesnce of Gaiman than a story of a child learning the rules of ancient magical beings and engaging in battles of wits, aided by ordinary things infused with their folkloric properties and just a touch of modernity being foreign to magical monsters.
But let’s back up a bit.
I’d forgotten how much of a slow burn this was? The events in the world behind the door escalate in their wish-fulfillment very slowly, and the back and forth between it and the real world lasts the bulk of the run time, in multiple verses. And really the story wouldn’t work without it, being able to see Coraline’s frustration with reality build more and more, when she has ever better experiences with Other Mother to contrast it with? It puts that little bit of a veil over the obvious evil behind a perfect world where everyone has buttons for eyes, and lets the viewer have that little bit of doubt that maybe they should want Coraline to stay too. It also gives the sudden shift once Other Mother offers to let her stay in exchange for her eyes retain a horror vibe despite everything being so clearly too good to be real.
And what’s great is you need all those misdirects because Coraline herself is so smart. Her natural impulse is to question everything around her: why is this like this, what’s over the hill, why can’t things be better. The thing that makes her tempting to Other Mother, the desire to imagine something better, also makes her dangerous. And presented with a hint, or a new fact, she’ll incorporate and utilize it very quickly. It’s just kinda a joy to watch her be so vibrantly young and eager honestly.
Really it’s just a perfect primer for Neil Gaiman’s work, and that’s intensely valuable. Horror without terror, skepticism without nihilism, honoring superstition and folklore without bowing to it, there’s a lot Gaiman does that few others have done, and the more people that explore those aspects of humanity the better.
So hey, let’s sing the praises of Laika. This is their first work, and while you can certainly tell they were figuring out the limits of what they could and couldn’t do, there’s some pretty amazing stuff here. What impresses me most is the tinier effects really. They don’t do much of it for obvious reasons, but they do dabble in dust and electric effects, and knowing how stop-motion works it’s an amazing thing to even attempt, let alone pull off pretty well. More than that the designs here are just wonderful, it’s all very stylized and distinct but never so much that the subtle off-ness of the other world immediately pops. The fact that it’s wrong is still immediately obvious, but the delights therein are also just real enough to want to overlook it.
Much as I can wax on about Gaiman, Coraline does feel a bit insubstantial overall. I can’t really quantify it exactly, but I guess the fact that it lacks any meatier happening than a single wicked witch means it never leaves the impression Gaiman’s weighter novels or Laika’s later work Kubo did. Still impressive and well worth watching, but lacks the personal investment those gave me.
Rating- 7/10
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