Coraline Review

Coraline is a wonderful family animated movie.

This stop-motion animated film follows Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) as her family moves into an old house that has been subdivided into apartments with eccentric occupants. Below are the dowager actresses, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (played by the comedy team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), while in the rooms above, Mr. Bobinski (Deadwood's Ian McShane) tries to teach mice to perform a circus act.

But Coraline is miserable. Her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have little time for her, engrossed in writing a gardening catalog. Left to explore the house on her own, Coraline finds a small, locked door that -- when opened -- sometimes leads to a mirror world where everything is perfect and centered around Coraline, thanks to the efforts of her Other Mother, who has buttons sewn where her eyes should be. But the Other world isn't quite the fantasy it's cracked up to be, as Coraline discovers the sinister intentions of the Other Mother, and her history of having stolen children from the house in the past. Pitted against the Other Mother, Coraline must rescue the ghosts of three other children, as well as her trapped parents, or become a button-eyed resident of the Other world forever.

While the story very closely sticks to the novel, the sound editing and plot pacing were sometimes off-putting. The volume continually seemed to fall off the register as one strains to hear it, and the meetings with the Other neighbors verge precariously on longueur. The costuming for the Other actresses is likely to raise eyebrows with some more conservative parents (a fat old woman in pasties is unlikely to be alluring, particularly when using stop-motion puppets, but may still prompt an urge for some mental Brillo). Of course, these meetings are all the set-up for the rescue mission Coraline must undertake, which happens with much more ease and rapidity, it seems.