Coraline (2009)
Directed by Henry Selick
Wandering her rambling old house in her boring new town, 11-year-old Coraline discovers a hidden door to a strangely idealized version of her life. In order to stay in the fantasy, she must make a frighteningly real sacrifice.
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What critics say influenced Coraline
The movie also owes a debt to Tim Burton, the visual whiz who produced The Nightmare Before Christmas, and whose earlier Beetlejuice is fondly recalled in the design of Coraline's funky home, where most of the action takes place.
But he also taps into a playfully Burton-esque streak of delicious dread that's as much Beetlejuice as Nightmare.
Working with the Japanese illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi, Selick comes up with a look that’s part Tim Burton (Coraline’s elongated house is right out of Beetlejuice), part Pinocchio.
If Selick has something in common with Tim Burton, it's the Burton of Beetlejuice.
In some ways, the dysfunctional relationship evokes that of the family in “Beetlejuice”, even with a haunted house thrown into the mix.
This animated fantasy, based on a 2002 children's novel by Neil Gaiman and directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas), is a visual marvel, but it's uneven in its story.
Employing stop-motion animation that renders human beings with the distinctive characteristics evident in both The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach , Selick finds the perfect look to bring Gaiman's vision to life.
He may finally have found a collaborator with as singular a vision as his own in Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas") for a film that genuinely captures his particular voice in the adaptation of his critically-acclaimed children's book, "Coraline."
As a commercial art form, stop-motion animation has been relegated to the pre-digital past, but don’t tell that to Henry Selick ("James and the Giant Peach," "The Nightmare Before Christmas"), the writer/director of "Coraline," a stop-motion animated film shot in stereoscopic 3D based on Neil Gaiman’s ("Beowulf," "Anansi Boys," "American Gods," "Stardust," "Neverwhere," "Good Omens," "Sandman") Hugo- and Nebula-winning dark fantasy novel.
You don't need things popping out of the screen to appreciate what director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and his stop-motion boffins have wrought, especially since you might well be looking through your fingers at times while watching it.
The director, genius puppetmaster Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "James and the Giant Peach"), has created an agreeably creepy wonderland of giant bugs, dancing flowers and acrobatic mice, along with a few hair-raising hobgoblins that find a worthy adversary in courageous Coraline.
Given this track record, it's tempting to conclude that Burton did much more than simply produce "Nightmare" and "Peach," in the same way Steven Spielberg did much more than produce "Poltergeist," allegedly directed by Tobe Hooper.
Gaiman penned the grossly underrated “Mirrormask” and essentially provides us with the exact pacing and eye catching creatures and machinations paired with some top notch animation that works as a mixture of claymation and computer animation that gives the dark atmosphere a peculiar more original taste.
This is familiar terrain for both Gaiman (whose original screenplay for the 2005 film MirrorMask centered around a teenage girl’s journey through a grim parallel world) and Selick (whose 1996 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl ’s James and the Giant Peach remains a modern classic of childhood make-believe at odds with grown-up insolence).
Based on a book by Neil Gaiman, whose alternate-reality narrative is analogous to his prior Mirrormask (and, of course, Alice in Wonderland), Selick’s stop-motion-animated story is dark and magical, a saga of adolescent discontent and longing that so dynamically careens between set pieces of elation and dread that one hardly has time to soak in all the twirling, tumbling visual marvels enveloping the screen.
There are also recognisable elements from writer Neil Gaiman's other work: the twisted mirror-world from his novella Coraline; the protagonist's fear of embarrassment by their parents from his new novel Anansi Boys, as well as spying spiders and flocks of evil birds.
Like Coraline , in which he gave us a bored young female protagonist who longs for adventure, here he simply spins that notion on its head.
This hodgepodge of special and not-so-special effects is the brainchild of Neil Gaiman, the wildly successful comic-book writer and graphic novelist ("Sandman," "Violent Cases," "Coraline"), and multimedia artist David McKean, his frequent collaborator making his feature directing debut with this Jim Henson Company production.
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The opening sequence is a bit too reminiscent of Edward Scissorhands, but is interesting nonetheless, and far better than the similar creation at the beginning of 9.
Coraline (2009) opens on a rag doll efficiently taken apart by hands of skeletal steel (like Edward Scissorhands but with menacing needles for fingers) and then turned inside out and recreated in the image of the blue-haired heroine Coraline.
Employing stop-motion animation that renders human beings with the distinctive characteristics evident in both The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach , Selick finds the perfect look to bring Gaiman's vision to life.
As a commercial art form, stop-motion animation has been relegated to the pre-digital past, but don’t tell that to Henry Selick ("James and the Giant Peach," "The Nightmare Before Christmas"), the writer/director of "Coraline," a stop-motion animated film shot in stereoscopic 3D based on Neil Gaiman’s ("Beowulf," "Anansi Boys," "American Gods," "Stardust," "Neverwhere," "Good Omens," "Sandman") Hugo- and Nebula-winning dark fantasy novel.
The director, genius puppetmaster Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "James and the Giant Peach"), has created an agreeably creepy wonderland of giant bugs, dancing flowers and acrobatic mice, along with a few hair-raising hobgoblins that find a worthy adversary in courageous Coraline.
Henry Selick, the mad-genius puppetmaster behind "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach," has brought Neil Gaiman's 2002 cult novella to the screen with almost all its playful psychodrama intact.
Like his James and the Giant Peach (1996), this is adapted from a popular children's fantasy—Neil Gaiman's 2002 horror novella Coraline, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Gaiman and screenwriter/director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas" and the underrated "James and the Giant Peach"), along with a small nation of stop-motion animation wizards, have painstakingly created an ambitious and marvelously detailed world.
In 2009’s “Coraline,” stop-motion maven Henry Selick saw no fear in the waking-nightmare elements of Neil Gaiman’s book and created an eerily enjoyable “Being John Malkovich” of sorts for fifth-graders.
Coraline discovers a small door in the living room that opens to a brick wall while waking and a Being John Malkovich corridor while ostensibly asleep that connects her house to a mirror-world in which her Other Mother and Other Father (John Hodgman) live.
But while the 16 years since his last stop-motion film haven't seen any feature-length competition except Corpse Bride, he hasn't lowered his standards.
Tim Burton, who wrote the story for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), has since topped it with another animated chiller, Corpse Bride (2005), while Henry Selick, who directed Nightmare, has been struggling to better it ever since.
“Corpse Bride” (2005) — Johnny Depp reunites with director Tim Burton for this stop-motion tale of a shy Victorian-era groom who, while practicing his vows, inadvertently revives the title character (Helena Bonham Carter) and finds himself trapped in the Land of the Dead.
Yet it’s also white-knuckle scary — not just cleverly morbid on the order of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride or Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but taut, suspenseful and altogether goose-bump-inducing in a way that recalls classic gothic horror.
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It's rich with symbols for connection and disassociation, from each patchwork minion dispatched by hero cat Cat (Keith David) releasing its guts in torrents of sand (thus announcing the picture's debt to both Alice in Wonderland and Svankmajer's adaptation of the same, Alice) to an encounter with a trio of child-ghosts ghastly for their expressions, which are frozen at the moments of their betrayals.
It opens into a portal that looks like a womb, or maybe the tornado funnel from The Wizard of Oz turned sideways.
Selick's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's primally charged saga is The Wizard of Oz of stop-motion, as deeply unsettling as the flying monkeys in that family classic.
As for that story: it's "The Wizard of Oz" laced with acid.
The alternate universe she visits at first seduces her with its seemingly unlimited pleasures—shades of Pinocchio's Land of Toys—but like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she's soon desperate only to go home.
Parables for puberty and dreams apparently haven�t changed much since The Wizard of Oz, though Coraline stands above the standard comfy fantasy with plenty of jagged lines and logic and proportion fallen sloppy dead.