02/05/10 - Coraline

Coraline (2009, 100 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327597/

I select Coraline to be the first Oscar nominated movie to watch this month. I'd wanted to see it for some time since I'd heard it was a really good blend of a child's story in a dark setting. While I hadn't immensely enjoyed The Nightmare Before Christmas (also directed by Henry Selick), I had loved it's stop motion animation.

Coraline is animated so most of the work is done by animators and other people behind the scenes. The actors lending their voices to the characters are: Dakota Fanning as Coraline Jones; Teri Hatcher as Mel Jones, Other Mother, and Beldam; John Hodgman as Charlie Jones, and Other Father; Keith David as The Cat; and Robert Bailey, Jr. as Wyborne "Wybie" Lovat.

Usually I reserve this paragraph for my comments on the acting talent. But with no acting necessary for the film, I'll instead talk about the quality of the stop motion. First, I'll say I didn't watch Coraline in 3D so I can't say how well everything transfers over, but I can say that the stop motion work is absolutely incredible. One amazing thing in and of itself is that Coraline is 100 minutes long which no doubt created a ton of work for everyone. But with all this work, no drop-off in quality. There's some highly technical shots (or what I would guess were highly technical shots) scattered throughout the film and some of these blew me away. I honestly did not even understand how some of the things were shot, they just seemed that complicated to me. Also, the fade sequences were particularly cool to me.

Another great thing about how Coraline is shown is that you really feel like it's a camera moving around real people. I mean by this that the shots seem to be formatted and done in such a way as to really recreate what the film would look like if it wasn't stop motion. Adding to this, I noticed that there were a lot of close-ups of the characters. I feel the reason for this was to highlight exactly how many expressions the characters (especially Coraline Jones) were capable of expressing. So even though some of these shots seem to have been included for this sole purpose, it doesn't take away from how great they look.

Now, for what I really didn't like about Coraline. First, there seemed to have the possibility to develop some more characters. I guess the difficulty lay in the fact that sometimes Coraline Jones was in the real world and some times in the other world, making character development only applicable around half the time. Personally, I feel characters like The Cat or Wybie could have been developed a bit more and it could have added to the story more. Next, I feel that there were some pacing issues. By this I mean that the first thirty minutes seemed to move really slow while not much happened. The movie really got good once Coraline discovered how problematic the other world really was. From here on out though, the film was pretty enjoyable, especially the concluding 20 minutes or so.

Finally, I'd like to add that the music was really impressive here. It really synchronized well with what as going on on the screen and that's huge in an animated film. It also added to the tension at times while at others being lighthearted and happy. Though not a musical or anything, Coraline still got the music part of the animated film down.

Overall, I gave this film a 7/10. Coraline was a really great movie to watch from a technical perspective (or so I felt). I don't know how it compares to Up on this front but I can say that Up still ranks above it on my list of animated films from last year even if they're really completely different genres of animation. Coraline created a really dark children's movie from stop motion animation and I'd personally be all for more films exploring this audience as I feel it has huge potential.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of Coraline to a 06/10.]