Coraline (PG)

Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is an 11-year-old who has just moved from Michigan to Oregon. Her parents – Mel (Teri Thatcher) and Charlie (John Hodgman) – write about gardens and look rather lifeless. They just work and don’t have any time for Coraline.  

When she’s exploring her new home – the Pink Palace – she finds a small door covered with wallpaper. Bricks seal it off in the day – but at night, she follows a mouse into the door that leads to a idealized version of her home life, one that’s fantastical instead of plain. Here, there are versions of her parents with buttons for eyes. They’re called Other Mother and Other Father, also voiced by Teri Thatcher and John Hodgman, respectively, and they’re happier and actually have time for Coraline.

Things are better here, and whenever Coraline goes to sleep she wakes back up in her plain world. But the world has sinister secrets, that sets up for a truly nightmarish third act when true motives come to light. 

To a fault, “Coraline” is slow to get going. It takes time introducing its incredibly eccentric characters, especially the ones that live in the Pink Palace Apartments, including fortune tellers Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French), as well as Sergei Bobinsky (Ian McShane), a strange, blue Russian man who owns a jumping mice circus. There’s also an original character that wasn’t in Neil Gaiman’s source novel, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), a neighborhood kid who befriends Coraline. 

His cat, voiced by Keith David in the Other World, also helps Coraline and that’s cool. Even when the film is a bit slow, the awesome music and atmosphere keeps it interesting. It’s also a super creative film with great animation. I’m not a big fan of stop motion animation – so I thought some character designs, mostly Miss Spink and Miss Forcible were odd, but the idealized world it creates is imaginative and there are some well-animated set pieces in the third act. 

This is the type of movie that will probably be better on a second viewing, and even on first viewing, it’s damn decent. The characters of Other Mother and Other Father are fascinating, and Coraline’s curiosity is great. There’s some creepy imagery in this that makes it so memorable, and I really like the message that the lure of a better world doesn’t mean it actually is a better world. 

– by Daniel Prinn