I’d read Neil Gaiman‘s Coraline a while back: scary, creepy, delightful… a little door that leads Coraline to another part of the house where the Other Mother and Other Father live, just like Coraline’s mother and father, but “better”… and with buttons for their eyes.
We watched the scary, creepy, beautiful stop-motion animation of the story this week. Very true to the spirit of the book, wonderfully put together, very satisfying.
There are some great bonus features with the DVD too – showing how the film was made, in all its myriad details. The woman who knits the minute jumpers Coraline wears, the people who made the mist, the puppet makers… Some of them are on the Coraline The Movie youtube channel. (The website is www.coraline.com .)
Most of all I like the story (even though I’m not a fan of creepy stories). The Other Mother, it emerges, is creating this Other World to please Coraline. But it’s not real. Coraline and the cat walk out of the garden into a world where the trees are just bare ideas of trees, everything is just white. The parts of the world the Other Mother hadn’t bothered with. And it all starts falling apart. Somehow, it was all a kind of Nothing, an alluring nothing, that you sense from the start with a kind of dread is just a trap. Now there’s a metaphor for all sorts of things.
(As if that wasn’t enough there’s a graphic novel too, which I haven’t read. You can hear Neil Gaiman interviewed by his daughter about this on this MP3 podcast here.)
