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DVD Review: ‘Coraline’ Is Creepy And Captivating
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Written by Cougar Press Staff
The film “Coraline” is visually captivating, with stop-action wizardry and a slew of interesting characters, all hamming maddeningly to steal scenes in this children’s film based on the story by author Neil Gaiman.
Gardens bloom in seconds and giant insects crawl with riders gleefully yelping on their backs, as if in some mutant, kaleidoscopic rodeo. Add to that the fact that you’re watching it unfold in colorful 3-D, and you’ve got the makings of an engaging outing for the kids. If only the thing wasn’t so darn creepy.
Normally of course, most parents are loathe to frequent anything smacking of disturbing, dark or suicidal. It’s generally a good rule to live by. That’s not the stuff of happy children’s dreams, though it’s surprising how many kids’ movies rely on shriek value to sell their stories and Happy Meals.
Many parents were upset, for instance, with the film “Igor,” which seemed from the trailers to be reliably scary, yet also reasonably safer than staying at home and risking flipping the channel to televised atrocities in Afghanistan – or worse, the subprime mortgage meldown.
Of course, the “Igor” trailers didn’t focus on the suicidal cat, which spends the flick trying to kill itself in increasingly creative ways. Naturally, the inevitable question arises: “Dad, what’s suicide?” To which most parents will respond with a quick segue into the intricacies of the subprime mortgage crisis. Self-destructive in its own way, true, but more esoteric than killing oneself, and certain to leave everyone healthfully confused by the end of the discussion.
But where “Igor” was creepy and moderately entertaining, “Coraline” was both creepy and exhilarating, featuring a strong heroine willing to risk all by climbing down a more demonic version of the rabbit hole than Alice ever braved, in order to save her parents from the clutches of her “other mother,” an arachnoid limpet with steel, springy needles for fingers and domestic rage seething beneath her apron.
The images were both scary and mesmerizing – truly, a marvel of imagination – although I wondered if they needed to be so dark.
Several times during the film, the kids announced how frightened they were, and they’re not exactly the shrinking types. The boy, for instance, once browbeat me into reading a Halloween story to his kindergarten class, in which a woman literally loses her head when the wrong ribbon is pulled from her neck. The kids, naturally, howled in approval, even as the instructor gave me that severe look mastered only by elementary teachers and Abu Ghraib jailers.
This is not as bad as portraying a self-destructive feline bent on offing itself, but momentary pangs of guilt were involved. Perhaps, then, we can forgive “Igor” and “Coraline” for trying to scare the kids in the name of cinematic excitement. Still, the youngsters are a long way from the dubious teenage thrills of “Halloween in 5D” (sure to come), and I’d like to keep it that way, for as long as humanly possible.
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