Director: Henry Selick
Writers: Henry Selick (screenplay), Neil Gaiman
Stars: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman
1 Hour, 40 Minutes
Get it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/31M8eAG
Mechanical fingers disassemble a doll. Then it gets new skin and parts and is reassembled into a girl and re-released into the world. Was that doll Heaven?
A new family moves into the Pink Palace Apartments. The girl goes out for a walk, but she gets frightened by a black cat. A kid in a scary mask nearly runs over her with a motorcycle. The boy shows her to the old well she’s looking for. He’s Wybie, and she’s Coraline. His grandmother owns the apartments.
Later, Wybie sends her a doll that looks just like her. She explores the old house and carries her “mini-me” doll with her throughout. She finds an old door that has been wallpapered over. Inside, it’s bricked up. She goes to bed.
Later that night, the little door opens and a magic mouse appears, who leads her through the magic door, which is now a tunnel that leads… back to her room. On this side of the door, everyone has buttons for eyes. On this side, her mother can cook and her father’s sort of a musician. Her button-eyed parents say they’ve been waiting for her. Her room is much nicer here, and everything is sort of magical. She goes to sleep and wakes up in the real world. The door is bricked up again.
She carries Mr. Bobinski’s mail upstairs to him. He’s a blue-faced circus acrobat. He gives her a beet. His mice tell her not to go through the little door.
She then goes downstairs to meet her other new neighbors. These are two old actresses who have a bunch of stuffed dogs. They tell her fortune, and it’s not good. Or maybe it’s a giraffe. They are very weird neighbors.
Wybie tells her that way back, his grandma had a twin sister that disappeared one day. He thinks maybe the house is haunted.
That night, she follows the mice through the tunnel again. This time, she goes outside the button-house into the garden. The garden looks like Tim Burton spends a lot of time here. On this side, Wybie can’t talk. They watch Bobinski’s jumping mice put on a show.
Coraline has a bad day shopping with her mother in the real world, and opens the little door in the afternoon. Wybie’s cat has followed her, and they have a conversation. He implies that things are not as they seem. The crazy sisters in the basement also give her a show. She comes to the conclusion that the button-world is way better than her real world.
They say that she can stay there forever. The only catch is she needs to have her eyes replaced with buttons. She freaks out and decides never to return. She goes to sleep but doesn’t go home.
The cat explains that the Other Mother created all this for Coraline. She wants something that just isn’t her. Other Mother eats bugs and has a house full of bugs. She changes shape into a tall, skeletal woman. She gets locked into a room with the ghost of other missing children. The Other Mother is called the Beldam, who lures children in with the doll until they sew on the buttons. The beldam ate up their lives. The ghosts want their eyes back; if Coraline can find them, their souls will be freed.
Other Wybie leads her to the little door, and she comes back through the tunnel, but it looks different now. Her mom and dad aren’t there. The old ladies downstairs give her a ring that finds lost things.
That night, the cat leads her to the mirror, where she sees her parents locked in a mirror. She finds a doll of her parents, which she burns. She has to go back for them.
Other Mother grabs her right away and swallows the key. Coraline makes a deal with her. If she can find her parents and the eyes, the Other Mother must let her go. If she can’t find them, then she’ll go ahead and sew buttons on her eyes.
As time runs out, she goes on a quest to find the eyes. We see the beldam in its final form, and she has the mechanical hands we saw in the beginning of the film. She wants to eat Coraline. Can she find the eyes and her parents?
Commentary
It looks like a Tim Burton movie, with everything that comes with it. It’s colorful, creepy, and has a lot of weird creatures and machines. Except Tim Burton wasn’t involved with this one, which just sort of makes it a knockoff.
The Other Mother gets creepier and creepier as time passes, and her form at the end is definitely nightmare material for any kid. It was maybe a little longer than it could have been, but overall, I liked this one best of this week’s films.