Summary

Coraline
teaches viewers to look beyond the surface to uncover true fears, making it an ideal introduction to horror movies.
The movie uses stunning stop-motion animation to create contrasting worlds that enhance the eerie atmosphere.

Coraline
‘s active and observant protagonist empowers young viewers to face fears and solve problems, shaping them into active horror movie watchers.

Coraline made a strong impression on me when I first saw it. I would’ve been 11, the same age as the protagonist, flipping channels one weekend before the rest of my family was awake (as I often did) and encountering it already underway. I can’t remember exactly where I jumped in, except I know I saw Coraline’s first journey through the little door. The tunnel unfurled for her, wonderfully aglow, and I was as hooked as she was.

Coraline Director Henry Selick Release Date February 5, 2009 Distributor(s) Focus Features Runtime 100 minutes Budget $60 million Expand

Another image of that magical passageway would be burned into my young psyche on that viewing; a dark mirror of the first. The tunnel now looks dead and abandoned, littered with cobwebs and forgotten toys that speak to decades of luring children to worse-than-deaths. Coraline frantically crawls toward her world while the monstrous Beldam wails and pounds on the locked door behind her. The barrier holds, somehow, despite the sickly green light that breaks through with each blow, but the force contracts the tunnel in sudden spurts. The Other World chases her, and hurtles toward the camera.

That sequence was (and remains) grippingly terrifying. It’s also why I’ve come to believe there’s no better movie to be scared by as a child than this one. And with Coraline returning to theaters for its 15th anniversary, I’d like to make the case for a whole new generation of kids being taken to experience its traumatic delights.

To Understand Coraline, Pay Attention To When It Unsettles You
It’s not just the Other World that’s creepy

The bones of the story will feel familiar, drawing as it does on the rhythms of a fairy tale. Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) has moved into a new home, in a new state, with her exhausted, inattentive parents (Teri Hatcher & John Hodgman). Everything is foreign, but her life is filled with boredom; the neighbors are old and odd, except for Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), who is young and odd. The only things that hold her attention are a little door behind the wallpaper, and a doll Wybie found that looks exactly like her.

She soon finds herself drawn through that little door, into a version of her life filled with wonder. The Other Mother waits for her there, as do the Other Father, the Other Wybie, and the Other Neighbors. They smile at her, dote on her, and do their best to provide an answer to each of her discontents. But however pretty the packaging, the buttons they all have in place of eyes keep them at a distance from her.

They know this. If she wishes to stay, they eventually tell her, she’ll have to sew buttons into her eyes, too. Things go horribly wrong from there, as we know they must, but Coraline is more than just a well-executed take on an age-old storytelling pattern. It has something to say about our world and its dangers, and it says it with rhythm and style.

I think of
Coraline
as one of cinema’s best unions of form and content. Director Henry Selick deploys stop-motion animation not just for its look, but its feel.

This movie is very deliberately paced. It doesn’t rush us to the Other World, nor does it hurry to have that dreamy place crumble into a nightmare. There are a few practical reasons for this. It allows us to take in fully how the two worlds mirror each other, for example; but perhaps most importantly, it gives the film its emotional texture.

Run your hand along its edge and trace the fear, and you’ll find it unsettling from the very beginning, when the Coraline doll is sewn by a spindly, metallic hand and sent off into the ether. But it’s not just supernatural things that disturb us. Reality is dingy, gross, and macabre. Disgusting food, whether unappetizing or rotten, is a motif. Wybie is introduced in a skull mask, rearing his bike like the Headless Horseman; middle-aged acrobat Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane) is unkempt and unusually blue; Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Forcible (Dawn French) have a wall full of taxidermied dogs.

The Other World, save for its uncanny button eyes, is perfect beauty by contrast — and the contrast is precisely the point. Coraline’s world, full of oddities though it is, is fundamentally mundane. Its imperfections are an exaggerated gesture at eccentricities we know to be based in truth. It is also benign, off-putting only on the surface. The Other World is the exact opposite. Its glittering façade hides true danger, visible only when the illusion decays along with the Beldam’s patience. Then the horror really starts.

Is Coraline Cinema’s Savviest Use Of Stop-Motion?
It’s certainly a perfect match for this story

This is why I think of Coraline as one of cinema’s best unions of form and content. Director Henry Selick deploys stop-motion animation not just for its look, but its feel. In the real world, he draws on the form’s inherent physicality. Like live-action, stop-motion materials exist and are photographed in the physical world. The mundanity Coraline achieves is helped by what’s on camera feeling “real,” however stylized it is.

Henry Selick has directed three other stop-motion features:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
;
James and the Giant Peach
; and
Wendell & Wild.

In the Other World, Selick instead emphasizes the medium’s meticulous, controlled detail. The love, care, and attention that goes into stop-motion is usually a positive, but in Coraline, the way everything has been carefully manicured triggers in us a sense of the unnatural. Especially when compared to the mess of reality, we sense the Beldam’s guiding hand before we are shown her grand design.

Related 10 Great Stop-Motion Horror Movies With Wendell & Wild and Del Toro’s Pinnochio coming out soon, it’s time to remember other great stop-motion horror movies.

What this teaches Coraline, and young viewers, is to look beyond the surface. What scares us at first might just be something unfamiliar that takes getting used to, and what we’re initially enchanted by might be concealing something we need to truly fear. It’s a good lesson that’s never voiced, but baked into the film itself. Selick and co. don’t stop there, either. Coraline also teaches its audience what to do with this knowledge.

At the heart of this is Coraline Jones herself, a force of a child protagonist. She may be vulnerable to the Beldam, but she isn’t easily taken in. She’s inquisitive, observant, and intuitively skeptical. Her role in the story is always active — she runs tests, plays tricks, and strategizes. She has help from a cat (Keith David) who slips between worlds at will, but his advice is hardly an instruction manual. For the most part, she’s piecing the rules of this world together herself.

Coraline Practically Teaches Its Audience How To Watch Horror Movies
After seeing it, you might find yourself falling in love with them

And so are we. Selick takes a show-don’t-tell approach to this story where he can, and the visual clarity of the direction means that we learn the same way Coraline does. This film may want to scare us, but it also strives to make us as observant and inquisitive as its heroine. We become active viewers, learning and making connections that fill the gaps left open in the worldbuilidng. As Coraline overcomes her fear to outsmart the Beldam, we get to experience doing the same.

To 11-year-old me, Coraline was as empowering as it was chilling, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I became increasingly drawn to horror movies in the years that followed. It practically teaches you how to watch them actively and work through the fear to get at what’s really going on underneath, whether thematically or technically. On top of being something I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as a masterpiece, it’s the perfect gateway horror film.

So, whether you already bear its scars or not, I implore you to take advantage of this opportunity to see Coraline on the big screen. And if you have children of the right age, bring them along. The odds are good you’ll be showing them a movie they’ll never forget.

Originally released in 2009, a new remaster of Coraline in both 2D and its original 3D formats returned to theaters on Thursday, August 15. The film is 100 minutes long and is rated PG for thematic elements, scary images, some language and suggestive humor.

5.0 Based on Neil Gaiman’s novella, Coraline follows Coraline Jones, a lonely young girl who, after moving to a new house with her inattentive parents, discovers a portal to another, more sinister alternate reality behind one of the house’s many doors. Written and directed by Henry Selick, the film uses stop-motion animation and stars Dakota Fanning as Coraline. ProsA thrilling & engaging modern-day fairy taleBeautifully animated in perfectly deployed stop-motionUnafraid to lean scary for a kids film, but does so with purposeFilled with striking, memorable images