Friday, February 6, 2009

Coraline: I Had Such High Hopes


I'll openly admit that I was looking forward to seeing the stop motion animated depiction of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline". With Henry Selick directing, who is most noted for "Nightmare Before Christmas", the animation was nothing short of amazing. With that being said, the way the story is executed, is slow and disappointing. The Plot itself is very interesting. A small girl (Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning) finds a small secret door in the new home that her and her parents recently moved into. It leads to a world that is completely opposite from the world she knows. Where her parents are nice to her, and the tenants that live in the house are not as creepy, yet more entertaining. With the small difference that everyone in the alternate world have buttons for eyes. As the story goes on, you find that the perfect world is not so perfect after all, and that Coraline should realize how good she has it in the real world. It's an interesting premise, and interesting how the alternate universe comes to be sinister. It's the journey to that point that is particularly agonizing. If any movie ever made me revert back into a child riding in the back of a Chrysler New Yorker chanting "Are we there yet", it is most definitely Coraline. The first hour builds up the story to a fault. It pounds it into your brain so viciously that the second hour of the film suffers greatly because of the pain you had to endure in the beginning. The best things I can say about Coraline is that the character design, animation, and environment design were all top notch. At least it wasn't as horrible as The Corpse Bride. That film was like taking a bag that looks like Nightmare Before Christmas, and filling it with human excrement.

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