Coraline (2009)

Official trailer

Coraline is Laika’s first feature and among the best films ever made for children, with the understanding that “for children” includes a willingness to frighten them. Henry Selick directed it. The film adapts Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella. Dakota Fanning voices Coraline Jones, a young girl whose family has just moved to a new house in Oregon. Teri Hatcher voices both her real mother and the Other Mother, the button-eyed entity that lives behind a small door in the house and wants to keep Coraline forever.

Robert Bailey Jr. voices Wybie. John Hodgman voices the real and Other Father. Keith David voices the cat. Ian McShane voices Mr. Bobinsky, who lives in the attic, and Jennifer Saunders voices Miss Spink, who shares the basement flat with Miss Forcible. Dawn French voices Miss Forcible. Coraline scares me, and I love it for that. It’s a fairy tale with real teeth, made by people who trust kids to handle a monster, and I think the craft in every frame is staggering. It’s an easy 10 for me.

The film cost approximately sixty million dollars and made one hundred and twenty-five million worldwide. It was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar and lost to Up. Up’s win was probably the right call but doesn’t diminish Coraline’s achievement. The film is widely regarded as the most successful children’s horror film of the 2000s and the most artistically ambitious American stop-motion feature since The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The Horror

This is a frightening film. The Other Mother begins as a charming alternate version of Coraline’s real mother. She cooks better.

She listens more attentively. She’s a button-eyed warmth that the real mother lacks. The button eyes are the first warning. The second warning is that the Other Mother wants Coraline to let her sew buttons onto Coraline’s eyes too, so that she can stay with the Other Mother forever. The reveal that the Other Mother is a child-devouring entity who has done this before is well paced.

The audience figures it out at about the same speed Coraline does, and I’m glad the film never lets us get ahead of her. The dread builds in the gap between how nice the Other Mother is and how wrong those buttons look.

None of this softens on screen. The Other Mother’s final form is a skeletal needle-fingered horror that pursues Coraline through a collapsing dollhouse-world. The dead children Coraline has to rescue are explicitly dead. The threat of having buttons sewn onto your eyes is treated with the seriousness it deserves. The film respects its audience’s capacity to handle real fear.

The Other Mother

The Other Mother ranks among the great villains in animation. Teri Hatcher’s vocal performance is the key. The first half of the film has her playing the Other Mother as warmer and more present than Coraline’s real mother. The audience and Coraline both want her to be real. The slow revelation that she’s hollow underneath, that her warmth is bait, and that her hunger is for the child she’s been pretending to love is among the most disturbing emotional arcs in any film aimed at children.

The character works because the metaphor works. The Other Mother is what every distracted, exhausted parent is afraid their child secretly wishes for. She’s also what every child who feels unseen secretly fantasizes about. The film takes both anxieties seriously and uses them to power the horror. The audience leaves with a renewed appreciation for the actual flawed parent they have, the film’s covert moral payload.

Hatcher’s performance is what disturbs me. I think the sweetness in the first half is scarier than the needle fingers at the end, because part of me wanted that attentive, better-cooking mother to be real too.

The Production

The stop-motion is the most technically sophisticated American stop-motion ever produced at the time of release. The character of Coraline alone has dozens of interchangeable faces, allowing the animators to combine specific eyebrow positions with specific mouth shapes to create thousands of possible expressions.

The Other World sets are physically built and lit, then digitally touched up selectively where the practical solution required support. The collapse of the Other World in the third act involves practical effects that took months to plan and execute.

It also came out in 3D. Selick designed the 3D carefully instead of adding it after, choreographing depth for the format. The 3D version is the better version of the film. The flat version is also excellent.

I think the animation is the star. Knowing Coraline has dozens of swappable faces makes me look harder at every flicker of her eyebrows, and the Other World is so vivid that I understand exactly why a lonely kid would want to stay.

Is Coraline as good as people say?

10/10. You get a great children’s film and a great horror film in the same package, and I wouldn’t trade a single frame of it. The stop-motion was the most accomplished American work in the form to that point, the Other Mother scares me more than most grown-up horror villains, and the film trusts its audience completely. That trust is why I give it a 10. Watch it, and let the kids watch it too.

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