Winning hearts one frame at a time

Coraline is about a girl who wanders into a dream world where adults try their darndest to transform her into a lifeless doll. Ironic considering the movie was filmed by adults who photographed a lifeless doll a frame at a time, transforming her into a convincing little girl. Call it life contradicting art.

Stop-motion animation, as old as King Kong himself, might be a special effect that’s impossible to outdate. It’s a very technical art form, tedious and exact: pose a figure, take a picture, move it a little, take a picture, and then repeat into infinity. Even the most sterilized, uncreative scenes are fascinating dioramas of toys in static poses. The complex scenes, the ones with action or more than one moving element, are logistical nightmares, juggling feats for animators striving for consistent speeds and movements — mouths that match dialogue is enough to cause brain swelling. When it’s done right, stop-motion animation can jumpstart the imagination. And Coraline drives the imagination bonkers.

It helps that the plucky, resilient star is the driving force behind every scene, every adventure, every burst of energy. Coraline is voiced by Dakota Fanning and after the film, as a testament to Fanning’s curious conviction to the voice acting and the filmmakers’ skills as animators, I could not picture what the young actress looked like — I could only see sweet blue-haired Coraline in her yellow slicker and boots. As spunky as she is, though, in some ways she’s a very sad character: her parents, gardening bloggers, have uprooted her from her friends and moved so they can mope around the house sipping cold coffee and barely noticing their daughter screaming for attention. And Coraline has serious doubts that either one has ever actually been in a real garden — “Mom, you hate dirt!” This distressed image of our main character is foreshadowing of the whole film's frightening images and themes. Little children might appreciate some of the fantasy, but later elements will … well, just bring extra underroos.

The gardening family move to the Pink Palace, an apartment complex out in the sticks. Coraline and her parents occupy the main house with other tenants in the attic and basement. Life is gloomy for the young newcomer, whose only friend is the local goofball Wybie — “Wybie as in ‘why be’ born?” he says to Coraline, who reprimands him when he says Care-uh-line as opposed to Corr-uh-line. I made the same mistake.

In the living room of the Pink Palace there’s a miniature door behind the wallpaper. Coraline, brave beyond her years, ventures through the small portal to find an alternate universe: another Pink Palace, another set of parents, and new versions of tenants in the top and bottom of the house. But everything has a cheery edge to it: Mom is pleasant and bakes mountains of exotic treats. Dad actually looks at Coraline when he talks to her. And the house itself takes on this magical glow that’s warm and inviting.

The fairytale world is almost better than Coraline’s real world, but there’s a catch: characters from the other dimension have buttons sewn through their eyes. (The button eyes remind me of a favorite Perry Bible Fellowship comic.) Slowly the polish and sparkle fades and Other Mother and Other Father turn into the monsters they were hiding from the beginning. Coraline, who enjoys her real eyes, has to use her inventive personality to get back into her own reality before she’s locked out permanently. Strangely enough, the villainous Other Mother looks a lot like Teri Hatcher, who does the voice acting. She starts out sweet and caring, but of course turns into a wretched, and very desperate, housewife: spiky boobs that begin halfway down her chest, exposed ribcage, stretched skin, elongated facial expressions, needle-y fingers ... it's a caricature of the part-time actress. Ooh, that felt kinda mean, but she's a mean character.

The film is based on a popular childrens book by Neil Gaiman, and it’s directed by Henry Selick, whose Nightmare Before Christmas has achieved cult status several times over. Between the two of them, they’ve created the most believable little girl in Coraline. She really wins your heart right at the beginning and guides your through the film’s funky visuals — manic player pianos, living gardens, bug furniture, acrobatic mice, a theater full of Scottish terriers and Mr. Bobinksy, a pot-bellied contortionist with chest hair thicker than garden hose.

Nothing against the other forms of animation, but stop-motion holds something over hand-drawn and computer animation — it’s real! Somewhere in this world, Coraline exists, either in storage, on display, or imprisoned in a glass cube on the director’s desk. The locations, those worrisome-looking Scottish terriers, the Pink Palace, Mr. Bobinsky … they all exist three-dimensionally in this world, not just on an animation cell or in computer code in Pixar’s archives. We occupy the same plane of reality that they do, and whether we comprehend it or not, there’s a closeness we allow ourselves to feel because of it.

This isn’t a new idea; I’ve felt the same affection for other stop-motion, or claymation, movies like Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit and Corpse Bride, wonderful movies that transport us into their little creative universes. All of them are essentially time-lapse photography of adults playing with toys, but telling marvelous stories at the same time. With movies like Coraline — and characters like Coraline — stop-motion will live on for generations to come because there’s no outdating a brilliant method of storytelling.