TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

'Coraline' Proves To Be Frighteningly Imaginative

Focus Features

'Coraline,' directed by Tim Burton, is the first stop-motion animated film to be conceived and shot in 3-D.

ADVERTISEMENT

By CHRISTY LEMIRE

The Associated Press

Published: February 5, 2009

Updated:

"Coraline," the first stop-motion animated film to be conceived and shot in 3-D, is visually dazzling, as you'd expect - but strangely joyless.

Henry Selick previously directed "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach" for producer Tim Burton, and the darkness that permeates "Coraline" definitely calls to mind Burton's trademark twisted sensibility.

Sure, "Coraline" is wildly imaginative, distinctly detailed and painstakingly rendered. It has its silly moments, such as the performance of a rodent circus, and blessedly, the three-dimensional effects are only reach-out-and-grab-you gimmicky a few times.

But there's no lightness to the adventures in "Coraline"; they feel overstuffed and airless. And the movie might actually be too scary for many children, especially toward its climax.

Selick also wrote the screenplay, based on Neil Gaiman's best-seller about a girl who becomes trapped in a parallel version of her world. Having just moved from Michigan to Oregon and feeling bored and lonely, 11-year-old Coraline Jones (voiced with gusto by Dakota Fanning) is thrilled to discover a secret door in the dreary boarding house where she lives with her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), who are too busy writing gardening-catalog copy to pay attention to her.

Once Coraline crawls through a long, spooky corridor, on the other end she finds a home that looks just like hers, only it's welcoming and vibrant. Dad cheerily writes music and tends to the flowers in the backyard. The neighbors aren't odd but playfully entertaining. And the woman preparing scrumptious goodies for her in the kitchen - the Other Mother, she calls herself - is warm and nurturing. That is, until her psychotically possessive tendencies take over.

Coraline gets some help in trying to escape this increasingly terrifying world from a talking cat (voiced by the smooth Keith David) and a goofy neighbor boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), a character Selick created for the script. But the Other Mother is a frighteningly formidable match, and Hatcher voices her with icy menace.

If children - little girls, in particular - take anything away from "Coraline," hopefully it's the film's message of ingenuity and self-reliance, and not nightmares. Or, worse yet, boredom.

MOVIE REVIEW

Coraline **½

MOVIE BOARD RATING: PG; thematic elements, scary images, some profanity and suggestive humor

STARS: Teri Hatcher, Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman, Ian McShane

DIRECTOR: Henry Selick

LOCATION: See movie times, Page 10, for local showtimes.

PLOT SUMMARY: A girl discovers a door in her home that leads to a parallel world that starts fun but eventually becomes terrifying.

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

ON THE WEB: www.coraline .com

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT