Coraline: A Nightmare Come True

Eight years is an unnaturally long time to develop a film in today’s frenetic entertainment industry. The YouTube generation has made entertainment an instantaneously available commodity and as a result the feature film industry has been recently forced into a more efficient machine often at the expense of good craftsmanship. But for every trend there is an exception. The 3-D stop-motion animated Coraline is proof that even in a digital age patience and hard work still produces some of the best art. Henry Sellick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) has meticulously construction what is without question a visual masterpiece of hand crafted elegance and thoughtful simplicity.

The plot is adapted from a book written by unsung fantasy scribe Neil Gaiman. It’s an eerie tale of a young girl who escapes her boring life through a small door in her house and finds a parallel version of her family in a perfect world that just might be too good to be true. The familiarity of the plot is its strength, adorning the archetypal realm of childhood nightmare with outlandish spectacle.

Coralline is a noticeable step ahead of all previous stop-motion feature films. Though it may lack the nuanced characterization of Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit series, Sellick makes up for it with a smooth-as-silk frame rate and eye-popping set pieces that must be seen to be believed. Since Coraline is Sellick’s first venture outside of Tim Burton’s guiding influence he seems to have been able to play to his own particular strengths. The tone is noticeably muted, trading Burton’s sensory barrage for a more composed approach. The Nightmare Before Christmas was a clamorous musical, but Coraline is a whimsical bedtime story.

Though the film is also being broadcast in standard format the simple fact is that it must be seen in 3-D. The newly innovated “Real-D” technology keeps the film’s wide range of colors intact and creates a perspectival panorama with seamless layers of illusory depth. The Real-D effect transforms the claustrophobia of stop-motion animation into an expansive moving diorama. This is stop-motion as it was meant to be seen.

Though Sellick tactfully employs a small degree of digital enhancement Coraline is almost entirely hand made. It is a captivating experience that shows how combining new technology with creativity, an old school work ethic and our generation’s scarcest virtue, patience can make good films great and create timeless art from simple ideas.

- B+