Coraline DVD Review

When experimenting with a new filmmaking technique nobody has ever used before, such as Henry Selick’s 3D stop motion animation of Neil Gaiman’s Hugo Award winning novella Coraline, the project can often considered a success even if the movie itself isn’t all that great. Fortunately in the case of Coraline, the film manages to accomplish both handily.

So let’s just get the story out of the way. While Selick made a few changes when crafting the screenplay (some big, some small) the essence of Gaiman’s story is virtually untouched. Coraline is a strong willed young lady with self-absorbed parents and an unusual name nobody can remember. When her family moves out to the country to stay at the Pink Palace Apartments, Coraline finds herself isolated and alone in a creaky old home inhabited by eccentric tenants. With her parents preoccupied with the move and their careers, Coraline discovers a small door that leads to an eerie mirror world that houses her practically perfect “Other” Mother and “Other” Father, their eyes festooned with obsidian buttons. It’s in this other world that Selick can really let his imagination run wild as Coraline’s “Other” Mother does everything she can to charm her into staying. All Coraline has to do in return is sew buttons into her eyes. Buttons? Gross! No way! (Anyone drawing any parallels with Baby Button Eyes from The Redeadening should note that Coraline was published in 2002 and “The Ziff Who Came to Dinner” only aired in 2004.) When things turn sour and Coraline finds herself trapped in the “Other” Mother’s web, Coraline challenges her to an adventure-off, a novel approach to a movie’s catharsis and the perfect thing for an impetuous little girl to triumph over evil at.

For those who didn’t bother checking out Coraline when it first came out, hoping to enjoy the same kind of 3D experience in the comfort of your own home, I weep for you. For the sake of practicality the DVD makes use of anaglyph 3D technology (red & green glasses) instead of the theatre’s polarized technique (those Buddy Holly style glasses) so the colours don’t come out quite a vibrant as the original cinematic release. Other than that, the presentations are identical down to the last meticulous detail. However, it shouldn’t be considered a shortcoming that one of the features for which the film was originally touted don’t come across in the home video release, because the the animation techniques remain just as groundbreaking. It struck me on my first repeat watching that with stop-motion animation, each moment captured, each frame formed by hand, is a moment frozen in time that you could actually step into. From the foreground to the background, everything has been meticulously handcrafted – the flowers, the pets, the windows and doors, and especially the characters. Coraline’s cartoonish form and blue hair really help accentuate her personality. Some of the characters on board might have been a little too charicatured, but that’s what the medium is all about: allowing characters to introduce themselves without saying a word as their distended forms tell the tale of who they are.

What I think I like best about about Coraline is that both the book and the film manage to accomplish what Terry Gilliam tried but failed to achieve with Tideland: to remind people that childhood can be frightening, and that children have the inner strength to face their fears. The trademark Gaiman creepiness that both the book and the film are steeped in paint a bit of an ominous picture, but that’s the whole point. To remind us that there are things that go bump in the night, and to watch out. And more importantly, that those things that go bump in the night can be defeated if you face them down. And maybe that’s what Henry Selick did here by breaking new ground in a medium of animation that has gone virtually unnoticed amidst the rise of computer generated features. While this film might not have solidified 3D’s rise in this new century, it is certainly an example of bold, creative filmmaking and a credit to Gaiman’s source material.

The special features accompanying the film bolster this home video release’s quality. The makers of the featurette were given an incredible amount of access to the production of the film, and when you combine that with a high degree of familiarity with the material, it makes for an insightful and enlightening examination of the film. A film where the whole world is created by hand offers a chance to hear from an impressive array of the crew, including the wardrobe, fabrication, art, animation, and visual effects departments. After witnessing the labour and care that went into the making of Coraline, I remain in awe of the process of stop-motion animation. A strange and twitchy deleted scenes presentation hosted by Henry Selick permits some the painstakingly created footage from the cutting room floor to see the light of day. As an editor, I didn’t like the style with which it was put together, but I appreciated the effort.