Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Second
Life
(Coraline, 2/16/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Once
upon a time, movie animators didn't even need computers to do their
work. Sound fantastic? Have a look at Coraline, the baroque,
sometimes creepy, frequently spectacular fable made mostly with old-fashioned
stop-motion animation.
Stop-motion is the technique behind
Gumby, Wallace and Gromit, and those Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas
specials (not to mention the Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer, and other
masters of the form). Sure, computer-generated animation (CG) has come
light-years in the last twenty years, and is suitable for telling just
about any kind of story. But there's still something missing— something
distractingly immaterial—about watching ones and zeroes, no matter
how cleverly deployed. For those of us still living in the 3-D meat-iverse,
animating something, whether a puppet or a piece of clay, has
a deep-seated tactile advantage over CG. Am I comparing apples to oranges?
Let's just say I prefer apples.
Coraline is directed by Henry
Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James
and the Giant Peach. This says it all about the film's style, which
features all the mordant creepiness of Tim Burton, but with none of
Burton's self-congratulatory preciosity. The eponymous heroine (voiced
by Dakota Fanning) is a precocious pre-teen who's forced to move to
an isolated farmhouse by her clueless parents (Teri Hatcher and John
"I'm a PC" Hodgman). Poking around, she discovers a hidden
crawlspace that leads to an alternative universe where her parents are
hip and attentive, all meals are scrumptious, and all toys are cooler
than Nintendo DS. But staying with "Other Mother" forever
has one big catch: like everyone else in that world, Coraline must choose
to get her eyes replaced with big black buttons. Creepy, indeed.
The film's visual style suggests
a gently-laundered version of Edward Gorey, with occasion flights into
the kind of colorized Victoriana (bugs, fairies, blossoms the size of
soccer balls) that never seem to lose their appeal for little girls.
But there's nothing girlie about the intensity of the imagery. This
is especially true in the last forty minutes when, among other things,
Other Father almost runs Coraline down with his giant mechanical praying
mantis, and Other Mother abandons her fresh-from-the-salon disguise.
With its intimations of menace beneath the surface of "normal"
family life, and adult-on-child violence, Coraline's PG rating
deserved to be taken seriously. The under-6 set is best sent to Hotel
for Dogs instead; impressionable 45 year olds might also take heed.
To be sure, considering that children
are bombarded with promises—especially from toy companies—that
their dreams can come true without costing anything, there's a worthwhile
theme beneath the macabre exterior. The same warning might as well apply
to adults who live significant portions of their lives in Second Life,
World of Warcraft or—for that matter—consuming Hollywood fantasy.
Full disclosure: Coraline
is hardly an exemplar of analog-era purity in a world of digital imagery.
There some CG here too. But it's used sparingly, to complement backgrounds,
transitions, and other ways that complement the spectacle. Though the
movie is about the dangers of making a fetish of fantasy, director Selick
hasn't been seduced by his toys. For its discipline, its message, and
its out-and-out baroqueness, Coraline is a crawlspace worth visiting.
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog