"Coraline" Movie Review

"Coraline" (quality rating: 8 out of 10)
(animation)
Director: Henry Selick
Screenplay: Henry Selick, based on the 2002 Neil Gaiand children's horror novel
Voices: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Dawn French, Ian McShane
Time: 1 hr., 41 min.
Rating: PG (highly disturbing plot elements, terrifying images, some vulgarity, suggestive humor)

Animation visual imagination of the first magnitude! Terrific.

And, one with an irresponsible rating as PG.

Watch out, parents. I am not being facetious when I say that "Coraline" should most definitely be rated R. Seriously, your kids may come away with a whole batch of persistent nightmares. They may be set up for therapy bills in later life. This is not the way kid entertainment should be.

But in its unbridled, fathomless reach into the swirling dark cauldron of the human imagination, in its super-quality visual appeal, this is an unforgettable film for adults. Yet its integity carries some question. Like, how about some attention to filling out characters and story? Like how about something we can live in, not simply be off-the-top spellbound on the outside? Would that have made its ownership of our darkest demons even greater?

Yes, it buries you in its own fancy. It jerks, jolts and immerses your eyes, not to say your mind's-eye -- all that neat stuff that spells fabulous spectacle, and with an eerie music score that will mix ice with your chills.

But inevitably it is powered almost entirely by spectacle, only incidentally by drama. It offers ultimate standards of the bizarre over dimensional characters. Weird, creepy, inventively spine-tingling, this'll haunt you for days.

No first-timer this, the story has been done as an Irish puppet show, a Swedish play, an Italian short film and a P. Craig Russell graphic novel. The world's writers and directors can see its colossal appeal at the deepest levels of the subconscious, in spots almost primal. Its addition to adult artistic understandings, to insights into the wildly free-associative expanses of all levels of consciousness is unquestionable.

The theme plays sprightly upon the age-old saying, "Be careful what you wish for. You may get it." animation to elongate his characters into skeletal spectres looming over poor Coraline.

Middle-schooler Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) has a boring life, even given her inattentive and unlikable parents who have taken her from Michigan to Oregon to their new abode, a boarding house which already houses two has-been actresss and the owner, a Russian acrobat with a rodent circus.

Coraline has abrasive attitude an makes it very obvious that she won't stand for life as it is for her. One day she finds a secret door which lead to a parallel universe. In this, she actually finds everything and everybody very similar to the dreaded world she just left, but somehow, by comparison, better in every way. Like well, it's run by a mother and father; the mother will become her "other mother," who, in striking contrast, is perky, upbeat and very caring and attentive. Or is she?

See now, the thing is that this other mother has buttons for eyes. In order for Coraline to be accepted to live there, which indeed this mother has ordained, she'll have to have buttons sewn into her own. "Soon you'll see things our way," she explains. Chilling? Only the beginning. That's only the first price of her sought-after new happiness.

Coraline's demons are just starting to surface. She's to find that this world is actually a very dangerous one, in which there are various horrors involving splatting and eating insects and outer dimensions of ghoulishness. Coraline's going to have to summon all her most creative genius to get out of this universe.

And you? You may never get out of it.

Marty Meltz is at http://www.martymoviereviews.com 30-year former films critic for the Award-winning Portland (Maine) Sunday Telegram. Offering right-to-the-point reviews that address directly the question of the film's entertainment value to you. Films have personalities. It doesn't matter who wrote it, who directs it, who stars in it, if it doesn't reach out to you at your deepest levels. I examine its honesty and intelligence. Are you being respected, or are you being jerked around? How much did the film take on as a challenge? Did it pick up its point and run with it? Did you care about it? Does it care about you?

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