The Chilly World of Coraline

They’re like the wanna-be dudes compelled to sport RayBan Wayfarers at every candlelight soiree. On three of the past four weekends, Americans have been obliged to wear 3D glasses as essential entertainment accessories. My Bloody Valentine sent pokers and pickaxes jutting out of the screen; the Monsters vs. Aliens commercial shown Sunday during the Super Bowl featured a profusion of protrusions. And here, on a more elevated plane, is Henry Selick’s Coraline, the first stop-motion animation feature shot in the process. (It’s also being shown in a “flat” version.) There’s so much 3D around — with plenty more coming this year — that “four eyes” is no longer an insult; it’s become a crucial movie demographic.

Coraline (pronounced core-align), which Selick adapted from a kids’ book by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, begins with a needle thrust in the viewer’s eye. Mostly, though, 3D is used to heighten the picture’s antirealistic, otherworldly mood. The illusion of depth is boldly stylized; the scene of a front yard or a kitchen will be a series of flat surfaces, like the planes in a pop-up picture book. This is the animated film as art film. Coraline doesn’t try to ingratiate; it just looms, like a cemetery gate, daring curious souls to tiptoe in and fend for themselves.

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That’s what the movie’s heroine, Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) must do. Newly arrived in Oregon from Michigan with her mother (Teri Hatcher) and father (John Hodgman), she feels ignored by her stay-at-home, workaholic writer parents. Father, hunched over his PC, is a mild, preoccupied sort; but Mother has no milk-drop of the maternal instinct. She speaks to Coraline in the curt, distracted voice that a stern boss would use on a cleaning woman who had entered her office during a conference call. Mother is efficient, officious, utterly joyless; you couldn’t make her smile if you handed her over to the Guantanamo tickling team.

Left on her own, Coraline wanders through the huge old house, now divided into several large apartments, to meet the other residents: Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), an eight-foot-tall blue Russian who runs a circus of more-or-less trained mice; and Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French), a pair of venerable theatrical troupers endlessly recounting their glory days in the music hall. Coraline also meets a boy her age, Whybe Lovet (Robert Bailey Jr.), the grandson of the grande dame who owns the place, and a talking cat (Keith David) with dark secrets he eventually spills.

For Coraline, the big secret is behind a small locked door. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Narnia children (and, by now, far too many tyke heroes of fairy tales), Coraline goes through the doorway into another realm. It’s a long, oddly uterine passage that leads to an apartment exactly like her new home, and with identical parents — except for two things. The weird news: Other Mother and Other Father have buttons for eyes. The better news: these cheerful folks instantly dote on the little girl as if she were the center of their universe. How lovely to see you! Have some cake! Let us tuck you into bed. Coraline thinks she’s lucked into paradise: that she’s escaped the loneliness and numbing drudgery of real life, where she’s either an obstacle or invisible, and discovered her mirror home, her ideal parents, an Opposite World where she feels wanted, pampered and, for a change, happy.

“You probably think this other world is a dream come true,” the Cat tells Coraline. “But it’s not.” He’s right. In the deeply, darkly conservative spirit of most fairy tales, which are not adventures but horror stories, Coraline will find that all those sweets and sweet words are simply fattening her up for the kill, like Gretel in the gingerbread house. And Other Mother is worse than a Stepford mom. She’s… well, we’ll just say she’s very bad, and has been so for a very long time. Almost as nefarious as her plans for her new recruit is the poison she pours in the girl’s ear, suggesting that Coraline’s real parents may have permanently abandoned her. “Perhaps they became bored of you,” Sham Mom says, “and ran away to France.” Shivery thought: that’s right — her parents are the restless young couple in Revolutionary Road, and Coraline is the child they disposed of. She’s dead and doesn’t know it.

The Marvels of Stop-motion

Stop-motion is an exacting form of animation in which puppets are posed in a scene, then photographed for a single frame, then moved ever so slightly, then photographed again — and 100,000 or so frames later, presto, you have a feature film. It’s been around from the beginning of cinema, since 1898, and for the patient artists behind the scenes, it must seem it takes about that long to finish a movie.

But the form pays off. Generations of TV kids have enjoyed the stop-motion subdivision called Claymation, which produced such scamps as Gumby, the California Raisins and Eddie Murphy’s Fox series The PJs. And on the big screen the results can be movie-magical. Among the stop-motion marvels are Willis O’Brien’s King Kong; the mythical creatures molded and manipulated by Ray Harryhausen in pictures like Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger; those endearing English eccentrics in Nick Park’s Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit shorts; the sprightly ghouls of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas.

“Tim Burton’s” was actually Henry Selick’s; he directed the film under Burton’s supervision. Selick next directed James and the Giant Peach, which managed to improve on the Roald Dahl children’s book, and Monkeybone, a pretty frantic mix of live-action and animation. All these films owe less to the chipper confections of Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks than to Euro-cartoonery like The Triplets of Belleville and the work of Czech animator Jiri Trnka.

That goes double for Coraline, and never mind that it’s set in rural Oregon. The figures are angular and mostly spindly, like undernourished Europeans after the war; they might be denizens of pestilential Vienna in the 1949 thriller The Third Man. Some of the characters are distinctly European, like Bobolinsky and the theatrical ladies. But even Coraline and the Cat, and certainly Other Mother in her final, spidery metamorphosis, lack the soft lines and winning personalities found in most U.S. animation. Indeed, the girl’s “real” environment and her dream-nightmare one are equally remote from the reassuring landscapes in standard American cartoon features. That chilly visual vocabulary, along with a narrative that too often detours into ingenious irrelevancies, makes Coraline an object to be admired, but not embraced.

Selick made the film at Laika, the Oregon animation outfit owned by Nike cofounder Phil Knight. The studio formerly housed the facilities of stop-motion producer Will Vinton, who’d done Oscar-winning shorts and The PJs. Knight, a stockholder in Vinton’s company, took over the place essentially to please his son Travis, who’d been a junior animator under Vinton. It’s the grand gesture of which only zillionaires are capable. A man sees his child merrily playing with model trains, so he buys the kid Amtrak.

If the Laika story is one of a father’s indulgence, Coraline‘s is about a mother’s indifference. It’s exactly the kind of book/movie that a writer/animator would dream up to convince his kids that, no matter how much he ignored them while he was doing his important work, they’re better off in this family than in any they may dream of joining. As Gaiman puts it, “sometimes the people who love you may not pay you all the attention you need; and sometimes the people who do pay you attention may not love you in the healthiest way.” It’s a position paper for benign parental neglect — for the security of Kansas over the surface seductions of Oz.

In her “real” world Coraline will get the chance to be a heroine, to vanquish the villains and win her parents’ attention (though Real Mother’s lips remain Perma-pressed). But the happy ending doesn’t dilute the story’s moral, obvious enough to stick like a needle in any kid’s eye. Both the book and movie warn kids to distrust the kindness of strangers, and find refuge in the prison of the status quo. It’s important, Coraline says, for children to learn that real life, though it may be preferable to being devoured by a Spider-Mom, ain’t so hot. That lesson is a cautionary preview of their adult years. Don’t expect perfection. Life is something not to be looked at through rose-colored glasses. Or 3D glasses either.

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