Coraline

I’d been meaning to mention that Oscar, Sunny, and I saw the film Coraline this past Friday night, which was its premiere date, and it was a bit of an event in a super cool way, long lines full of caffeinated people (it was the 10:00 pm showing), 3-D glasses and all.

Regarding the 3-D, I think this was ungimmicky, well-utilized or well-presented, unlike the recent Beowulf, which made me extremely headachey and motion sick, and also made me feel as if one of Angelina Jolie’s gilded tits would poke my eye out. In Coraline, the 3-D gave us just enough depth perception and gravity especially in that weird other world on the other side of the door.

As for the film itself, I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed its eerie and cute soundtrack. It, like the film, borders on precious, but comes back to the dark as appropriate. I am glad to have recently read the book, so the narrative was pretty fresh in my memory. I like the character of Coraline; she’s spunky, feisty, and really very sweet. My impression of her is that even as she expresses her boredom or other childhood dissatisfactions to her parents, I don’t think she comes off as a frivolous, petty girl or a whiner, and I am glad for this. I think too many female characters are generally squandered this way.

And while the narrative of the young girl (borderline adolescent) suddenly left to her own devices in a bizarre place is similar to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, I think a pretty substantial difference between Coraline and Miyazaki’s young spunky heroine Chihiro is that whining factor which makes her at some points in the film an unsympathetic character. This might be a result of voice casting. Conversely, I think Dakota Fanning’s Coraline effectively avoided that whining even in Coraline’s most interminably bored and groaning, complaining moments.

***Spoiler Alert***

So Coraline then, in the book, was left to her own devices, and succeeded in finding all of the other children’s souls in that other world, as well as banishing the Other Mother to that other weird world with the help of the cat. Much of the effectiveness of the book is that terrible loneliness of her family’s empty home, which in the film we see in her crawling into her missing parents’ bed, and making parents out of pillows, and crying herself to sleep between them. So the loneliness, and that she overcomes the danger of the Other Mother almost single-handedly. In the film however, they have created another character entirely, the twitchy boy next door Whybie, and he unwittingly provides Coraline with clues, tools for what she has to do. In the end, after she’s done much of the work, he has to come out of nowhere and save her, and they together banish the Other Mother’s disembodied needle hand down the well.

We are all left to wonder, especially those of us who’ve read the book, why a girl character can’t accomplish her mission or overcome nearly impossible situations without a boy saving her. I think the addition of Whybie is a device to make the film appealing to a boy audience, who otherwise would think the film to be a girl power thing, but still, I think his presence takes away from the point of the story. You know how in fairy tales, girls and virtuous young ladies find themselves in peril, and while they do receive help from various types of benefactors, kindly woodcutters, gender neutral dwarves, fairy godmothers, and in Coraline, the cat, many times, the hard reality of the un-Disney-fied stories is that the prince doesn’t come, and the girl has to outwit and out think the evil villain or die trying. So that’s my only complaint; the addition of Whybie makes this otherwise awesome story creep closer to the insidious Disney master narrative of gender!