Coraline (2009)
Mar 10th, 2009 by Debra Murphy
directed by Henry Selick
reviewed by Debra Murphy
Coraline held two points of interest for me: First, it is a stop-motion animated children’s flick, and I like to go to the movies with my fifth grader. (We had a grand old time at Kung Fu Panda.) Second, Coraline’s setting was based on my beloved home town of Ashland, Oregon.
It is a stunning movie, visually, and I only saw it in 2D. (Coraline was designed to be viewed in a new souped-up 3D format, but that option wasn’t available at my local theatre.) The look and feel of it is beautiful in many respects, particularly in its “Ashlandy” feel, with its backdrop of mysterious and misty green mountains and a quaintly eccentric downtown architecture that preserves the root of its model, however creatively unfaithful in branch and twig.
As for the take-your-kid-to-the-movies part, my fifth-grader enjoyed the film, for the most part, but told me outright afterwards that he thought it should have been rated PG-13, not PG. In a few places, he confessed, he was a little creeped out. As for me, I couldn’t agree more, and I’m at a loss to understand how the filmmakers managed to finagle a PG rating. Granted, the market for animated films are child-centered, so I can see why a PG rating was desirable, but Coralline contains a couple of elements that for my money (and I’m a fairly relaxed parent when it comes to these things) crossed the line into scarier and more adult material.
The story, based on a Neil Gaiman YA fantasy, is classic Brothers Grimm fare, updated. A young girl named Coraline, uprooted from Detroit to Oregon by her stressed-out parents, who are putting together a garden catalog, finds she pretty much has to fend for herself. Fortunately—well, sort of—their new home is a huge old Victorian monstrosity called “The Pink Palace”, divided into subunits and peopled by a motley but entertaining crew of retired performers—two aging theatre divas and an elderly Russian circus acrobat, voiced by the marvelous Ian McShane. (In this, too, the film is faithful to the “feel” of Ashland, which boasts a much higher than average percentage of theatre people, musicians, and artisans of every description, the more eccentric the merrier.)
But the Pink Palace is home to another, less wholesome resident, a wannabe “mother” from a parallel universe, accessible through that perennial “low door in the wall”. This creature lures dissatisfied young children like Coraline by means of magic dolls and a promised life of bliss where the “other mother” provides for every whim, from gourmet meals to enchanted gardens and on-call circus performances.
But once the “other mother” has the child firmly in her clutches, things get ugly, and I do mean ugly. This is also where the film got problematic for this Catholic mother of an eleven-year-old.
For example, one of the other-world circus performances was a doll-version of the two aging divas, scantily-clad, doing a high-flying trapeze routine. Given that one of the old dames was roughly a EEE-cup wearing nothing over her ample (and buoyant) bazooms besides what got Janet Jackson in trouble during that infamous Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction”, I was surprised and annoyed that the PG rating didn’t reflect the crudity of it, even if animated. To me, it seemed wholly unappropriate for less than teenagers, and prurient and unfunny at any age.
Then, in terms of the Ick Factor, the “other mother” starts to show her true colors until she is finally revealed as a cross between a most unhumrous Cruella DeVille and a mechanical Shelob. I don’t know which bothered me more, the fact that this creature might be associated in some children’s minds with a “mother” figure, or that the (granted) superb animation was of the disturbing variety guaranteed to get under a viewer’s skin and linger for days after. It certainly had that effect on me, and I’m an adult.
My son, I’m happy to report, seems none the worse for wear, but consider yourself warned. And if you want my advice, stay home and rent Kung Fu Panda instead.
