Coraline (2009)
Sweet Without Sugar
Zombos Says: Excellent
The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one–after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?” (Neil Gaiman in the novel Coraline)
Right after seeing Coraline, an urge to read the novel drove me straight to the bookstore. I needed to know more of Neil Gaiman’s tale of Coraline Jones and the bizarre neighbors and ancient wickedness living in her new home. I needed to know how much of the literary story was captured in Henry Selick’s stop-motion animated screenplay. With a dad-playing piano, glowing flowers and snapdragons that really snapped, and a peculiar room where giant bugs are the furniture, I was curious. Gaiman might be that odd individual with sleeping dust in his side-pockets, a razor-sharp, barely chipped axe in his hip pocket, and a candle flame floating to and fro behind his eyes, but the visual tone of Coraline, the movie, is dark but strikingly peppered with color, making it festive and morose and desolate and cheerful all at once. There is no brave little mouse, no fumbling robots, no dancing zoo animals to liven up culturally proscribed moral lessons because there are no moral lessons. Coraline, without the usual spoonful of sugary-animated, paternally medicinal Hollywood characters, is a Halloween treat in February that goes down smashingly well without the sweetness.
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