Coraline: A modern day Wizard of Oz

“You prob­a­bly think this world is a dream come true… but you’re wrong.”

Cora­line is one of those movies I knew I would love before I even knew any­thing about it. Between being writ­ten by fan­tasy god Neil Gaiman , directed by Henry Selick (The Night­mare Before Christ­mas) , and fea­tur­ing dark and dreamy stop-motion visu­als, it just had my name writ­ten all over it. Nev­er­mind that I had never read the story*. I knew I had to see this movie the moment I heard about it.

And I was not disappointed.

From begin­ning to end, Cora­line is an absolute delight on the eyes and ears. It was sort of like watch­ing the inhab­i­tants of a Vic­to­rian doll­house come alive and invite the entire toy box over for tea. Every char­ac­ter was lov­ably quirky, funny, and mem­o­rable; includ­ing the per­son­al­i­ties of the not-always-inanimate objects. Even the voice act­ing of Dakota Fan­ning and Teri Hatcher, two actresses whom I ordi­nar­ily don’t care for, was very well done. I found myself so absorbed that it didn’t even occur to me which famous per­son I was lis­ten­ing to, which is one thing I typ­i­cally dis­like about ani­mated films–I tend to hear the celebrity, not the character.

And the visu­als were top-notch, as usual, which seems to be stan­dard for all of Henry Selick’s pic­tures so far. Kudos to LAIKA ani­ma­tion stu­dio and the hun­dreds of tal­ented peo­ple who brought the world of Cora­line to bril­liant life.

But Cora­line isn’t just eye candy. Like most of Gaiman’s sto­ries, Cora­line has a good mes­sage, and deliv­ers it with a bit of clever wit wrapped in child­like intrigue. Movie­go­ers may find Coraline’s sto­ry­line sim­i­lar to Mir­ror­mask , another of Gaiman’s stories-turned-movie, in which a young girl becomes dis­en­chanted with her life and par­ents, escap­ing to a dream­world where the grass seems greener at first, but soon dis­cov­ers it to be a warped and night­mar­ish ver­sion of her own reality.

I’ve seen some crit­ics already refer to this movie as a clas­sic , and I don’t think I would dis­agree with that. In many ways, the story of Cora­line is rem­i­nis­cent of another clas­sic, The Wiz­ard of Oz. And like Dorothy, Cora­line reminds us that there’s no place like home.

*Note to the book Nazis: Cora­line is pretty faith­ful to its source material.

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1. Happee Tanks­giv­inz