(courtesy IMP Awards)
There’s often admittance by people that they are “late to the party”, as if watching or reading or whatever something long after it’s come out – or sometimes, mere weeks, such is the frantic and unforgiving pace of the modern digital age which eats its newly-released young for breakfast and moves onto the next buzzy thing with nary a backward glance – is some sort of pop culture-consuming mortal sin.
It’s not, of course, thank goodness, but beyond that, the truth of the matter is that if something is well-made and possesses a story of universal resonance and emotional truth, it can be discovered at any time and still make a large and sizeable impact on you.
It helps too if said piece of long-existing pop culture brilliance is made by the wondrously good Laika Studios (The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link) who craft their work with such care and an eye to detail which it comes to characters, setting and really everything else, and who imbue Coraline, based on the book of the same name by Neil Gaiman, with not only visually immersive richness but so much rich and deeply affecting humanity.
Released in 2009, Coraline takes a fairly common and understandable premise of a disaffected child who thinks her self-involved writer parents – they write about gardening but ironically don’t grow a thing themselves – don’t care for or love her and who have moved to the wilds of Oregon without any regard for how this will ruin her life.
While she has made friends of a sort with the other idiosyncratic inhabitants of the haunted house-looking, gothic mansion environs of the Pink Palace Apartments – eccentric mouse circus owner Sergei Alexander Bobinsky (Ian McShane) and gloriously odd retired burlesque actresses April Spink and Miriam Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French respectively) and even annoying local kid her age, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) – Coraline remains convinced, in all the claymation, stop-motion glory, that she is hard done by and could certainly be happier any other place than where she is.
What’s truly appealing about Coraline is that it doesn’t try to make everyone truly likeable.
Many movies of this type give us a plucky protagonist who may come up against some truly terrible people but who themselves is a bastion of goodness and light and the sort of truth that will dispel the darkness they come up against.
But Coraline is wonderfully flawed and even quite bratty at times, treating the quite sweet, if weirdly idiosyncratic Wybie as if he’s a huge irritant and unworthy of friendship, when in fact he’s the one person she should be staying close and heeding, and just about everyone else in her life, as if they are not god enough to be in her life.
She’s polite sure but ultimately out for herself, as many kids can be when their whole world has such tightly defined and yet to be tested parameters, and so when she finds a portal to the Other World (OW) which features, among other things, welcomingly perfect versions of her mother and father who feed her what she wants and treats as the princess she clearly sees herself as, she assumes that here is the nirvana she’s been looking for.
While many of those she knows (including a talking cat, voiced by Keith David) in the normal world caution her, rather strenuously against going to the OW and certainly not being taken in by its seductive pleasures and charms – Coraline doesn’t have the emotional maturity yet to understand that the OW is the perfect distillation of everything she’s ever wanted and thus is likely to be too good to be true – she ignores them all, even ignoring the fact that everyone has buttons for eyes.
Sure that’s creepy, and Coraline does at least acknowledge that, but so consumed is she by this perfect home-away-from-home that she dismisses all the niggling things that trouble her and plunges into embracing a place where parents give her everything she desires, where flowers grow in patterns most remarkable and vividly, colourfully etched and where everything is plentiful and comes without strings.
But of course, Coraline is a morality tale and so, while she thinks the gravy train of the OW is hers without consequence or price, there is a great and terrible darkness lurking within, and dealing with it, which Coraline belatedly does with great bravery and tenacity, finally earning her plucky, transformative heroine stripes, comes close to costing her just about everything.
This journey from disaffected child to wiser, more able daughter who appreciates just how good she really has it with real world people who love her without condition is a joy to watch, helped along by stiop-motion animation that is so lush and richly realised that whether you’re in the real world or the OW, you feel as if you are immersed in places that could and do actually exist.
While Coraline is on the lighter side of the fantasy-horror spectrum, it still very much occupies it and there are some scenes, particularly in the hair-raising, nerve-trashing everything-on-the-line final act, which are genuinely very, very scary.
Not simply because the dark character at the heart of the cosy mirage that is the OW until it is not, is all your nightmarish figures rolled into one, but because the movie doesn’t pretend for a second that life comes without consequences and that all those lovely things we treasure and embrace might have some real terrors and darkness lurking within.
It is a genuinely unnerving film to watch at times because of its unstinting embrace of how terrible the darkness of the world, whichever world can be, but it is, in the end, reassuring in its message that tenacity, love and a commitment to fighting for what is right, and to be fair, your own selfish survival, can overcome even the most terrible of things, though admittedly at some considerable cost.
This reviewer might be technically “late to the party” but with a film this good and so beautifully and wonderfully told, it matters not because Coraline‘s messaging, narrative and richly gorgeous visual imagery are eternal and affecting even some 18 years after its initial release.