Henry Selick’s ‘Coraline’ an Early Contender For Best Animated Film of 2009

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Henry Selick, the visionary director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach” has masterfully directed a mesmerizing journey into the world of imagination called “Coraline”.

Based on the beloved book by Neil Gaiman, “Coraline” is a nearly perfect stop-motion animated adventure featuring excellent voice work by Teri Hatcher, Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman, Ian McShane, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, and Keith David.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) gets a surprise in the stop-motion animated 3-D adventure Coraline, from LAIKA Entertainment for release by Focus Features.
Photo credit: Focus/LAIKA

Last year was an incredible one for animation with moving masterpieces like “WALL-E” and “Waltz With Bashir” and crowd-pleasers like “Kung Fu Panda” and “Bolt,” so it’s hard to say that “Coraline” would have been the best animated film of 2008, but it’s also easy to believe that we won’t see one better in 2009. It’s that good.

What immediately distinguishes “Coraline” is the creative team’s understanding that it is okay to honestly scare a young audience. Some of the best children’s fiction from “The Wizard of Oz” to Roald Dahl features genuine fear, something that modern filmmakers often forget. Selick and Gaiman are unafraid to send a shiver down the spine of their audience, children and parents alike.

The story of “Coraline” doesn’t need to be sugarcoated. It should feature some honestly terrifying imagery and Selick pulls no punches. It’s the fearless design of “Coraline” that sets the film apart from the very beginning. And that design looks amazing with the best Real 3D technology the cinema has yet seen.

The 3D world of “Coraline” has been brought to life to tell the story of an imaginative young girl named Coraline (often mistaken for “Caroline”) Jones. The impudent Coraline has moved to the first floor of a rental home with her writer parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman of They Might Be Giants) and is, like a lot of children, tragically bored.

After spending time dealing with the neighborhood kid named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) and visiting her upstairs neighbor, a drunken acrobat named Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and the pair of former stage stars (Jennifer Saunders & Dawn French) who live downstairs, Coraline finds true adventure behind a secret door in her own house.

In the Other World, Wybie (voiced by Robert Bailey Jr.) and Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) are drawn to a circus in the stop-motion animated 3-D adventure Coraline, from LAIKA Entertainment for release by Focus Features.
Photo credit: Focus/LAIKA

Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Alice in “Alice in Wonderland,” or the kids in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe,” Coraline enters a dream world that seems magical and inviting but hides secret dangers. Through the door, Coraline finds the “other world” with an alternate mother and father and far more entertaining versions of her housemates.

Of course, as with all of these fables, everything is not as it seems and Coraline soon realizes that she’ll have to fight her way back to the real world if she wants to survive.

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“Coraline” features basic storytelling tenets of other fantasies but Selick and his team have found a way to make it all feel refreshingly new. Coraline herself is masterfully designed, a more expressive character than several of the human ones that we’ve seen so far this year. And Fanning’s excellent voice work goes a long way in making this heroine completely three-dimensional. For the record, Teri Hatcher is surprisingly good as well, getting to play both sweet and deadly in one film.

Most people will take the trip to the “other world” with Coraline because of the visual aesthetic of Henry Selick and they won’t be disappointed. The best compliment one can pay “Coraline” is that this world has been so vividly realized that there were moments when the story sucked me in to the point that I wasn’t focused on the technical accomplishments. I was just enraptured by the storytelling.

All that holds “Coraline” back from standing on the same pedestal as films like “WALL-E” and “Waltz With Bashir” are a few elements of Gaiman’s story that could have been tightened a bit and Selick is still more of an impressive visual artist than he is a writer of dialogue. The script could have used one more editorial pass. But these are minor complaints regarding an early contender for the Best Animated Film of 2009.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com