Marvel mines its junk bins for Thor-ible film

Talk about starting the summer movie season with a bang — a bang to the side of the head. Some movies give you a good time; Thor just assaults you then gloats over your unconscious body.

Oh, it gets worse: it’s all in 3-D because two dimensions of torture just aren’t enough. Call me a contrarian stooge for not liking this beloved comic movie. Call me an elitist snob for not appreciating the dense comic mythology. Call me a jerk for blasting a movie you’ve been dying to see. Just don’t call me when Thor gives you a raging headache from its paralyzing 3-D effects.

Here is Thor, a blond bruiser with a bad attitude. The film begins on Earth but jumps to another planet, Asgard — mind the pronunciation — where Thor and his buddies, all of them wrapped in similar football padding, prance around beating up bad guys on ice planet Jotunheim. Asgard, Jotunheim, Mjolnir, Volstagg … the names will only make sense if you’re a Nordic raider, or have somehow braved ridicule by reading Thor comics when everyone else was reading X-Men and Superman. (Seriously, Thor?!? Is Marvel out of comics to adapt? What’s next Dolphin Boy?)

Thor is steeped in mythology. He ain’t no simple Spider-Man, who can be summed up in three sentences: “Spider bites boy. Boy gets super powers. Boy uses super powers to fight crime.” Thor’s origin story, which pains the entire first half of the movie, is more complicated. He’s the son of Odin, a wise and great god-king in Asgard, a land that has a railway of lightning that can traverse the cosmos, though Thor rides to the lightning machine on a horse. Odin must choose the next god-king, which comes down to Thor and his weasely little brother Loki. I knew Loki was the villain in the first shot because he had slicked-back hair — it’s almost always a dead giveaway, more so than the “No. 1 Villain” T-shirt.

A power struggle erupts and Thor is cast to earth without his powers, of which there are many: flight, lightning punches, sonic booms kicks, and the wielding of a boomerang hammer. In an earlier scene, Odin tells Thor that his hammer is a “weapon to destroy, or a tool to build.” Guess what Thor uses it for? I kept wishing that IQ-deficient Thor spoke like Hulk: “Me Thor. Me crush with hammer.” No one expects Thor to fly down to the South and start repairing tornado damage, or zip on across to Japan to rebuild from the tsunami, but that line is insulting. Marvel would rather inject Drano into its eyeballs than feature a superhero who builds something. Name me one fat comic fan that would sit through a movie about Superman repairing levees or Batman doing homeless outreach to crackheads.

Much of the film takes place on Asgard, the realm of Thor, and these scenes are horrible in nearly every way. The dialogue is laughable, the effects are weak, and all the mythology is just silly. And there are more funny hats than the royal wedding. The Earth scenes are slightly better, including the one where Thor walks into a diner and says, “This mortal form has grown weak. I require sustenance.” He orders more coffee by throwing his mug on the floor and yelling, “Another!” You’ll laugh, as I did, but only because Thor’s the dimmest of Marvel’s bulbs. Oddly enough, Thor’s staging of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would be quite moving.

Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, a relative newcomer. He’s a perfect Thor if only because he plays right into the title character’s oafish goofiness, which only contradicts the film’s later heroic posing. Hemsworth is surrounded by some major talent, including two Oscar winners — Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins — though the characters can’t seem to get a foothold on the material. They spend too much time blubbering in convoluted prose and endlessly explaining Odin’s many faults to ever recover from the film’s melodramatic undertones. When the action elements finally wrestle the plot away from the Asgardian windbags, it’s too late and Thor is mired in too much story, too many cruddy 3-D effects and all those silly outfits.

Thor’s director, Kenneth Branagh, a fine Shakespearean actor and director, was working with too many elements here. The dialogue is atrocious. The pacing is unbalanced. There are too many characters. And generally he makes some critical missteps. For instance, actor Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) is cast in a role that requires him to wear a ridiculous costume, walk in a clunky robotic gait and speak in a chunky monotone. Why bury a fine actor in a meaningless role? The movies seems bored with its characters, which is probably why it later resorts to outright kidnapping when Thor faces off against, I kid you not, the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That doggone extra dimension of movie doesn’t help any of this. Much of the film is shot in that hyper-cut style of editing. I find that fad difficult to watch in 2-D, but here it is in 3-D painstakingly slamming itself against your frontal lobe trying to batter out a seizure or two. With action pieced together from dozens of angles and then sped up in a flurry of images, the 3-D effect is useless and counterproductive. By the time your eyes convince your brain that what you’re seeing is a three-dimensional image the shot changes and the whole process starts over again — we’re talking nanoseconds here, but they add up. And since elements within each shot are constantly shifting from foreground to background, and back again, the film constantly plays tricks with your eyes. As if to make matters worse, every camera angle, even ones as simple as basic close-ups on talking heads, are tilted, as if Branagh left his Shakespeare collection under one leg of the camera tripod. At best the 3-D won’t work; at worst you’ll get a headache or feel dizzy.

In the end, though, the joke is on the audience: Thor will get people to pay money to sit indoors and wear sunglasses.

Even more despicable 3-D; stop it already!

Despicable Me has its cute moments — the little doe-eyed children, the caricature-like animation style, those impish yellow minions and their squeaky little banter. But underneath this cutesy icing is a very confused cake.

For starters, it’s a movie about a villain. The most obvious plot arc in a movie like this would involve this villain doing horrible, despicable crimes but eventually growing a conscience, understanding the moral implications of his actions and becoming an upstanding human being who waters his lawn, waves at the milkman and, oh I don’t know, doesn’t steal the freakin’ moon. But that’s in a better movie. This movie justifies the criminal’s crimes by having him read his (kidnapped) children bedtime stories — “Good story, dad, all is forgiven.”

We begin with Gru (Steve Carell), a round gothic thug in the mold of Uncle Fester. Gru is a supervillain. The movie is not shy about this element. Don’t go assuming there’s a caped hero that will figure into this; maybe he’s fled to a better movie. And don’t look to Gru to fill those hero shoes: he begins Despicable Me as a lecherous villain and ends it as a lecherous villain … with adopted children.

How he gets these children seems to go against everything we’re taught in the first scenes: See, supervillains can take whatever they want, be it the Times Square JumboTron or the Great Pyramids. (And why would Egypt try to cover up the theft of their landmarks? It makes no sense.) This kind of thievery renders borrowing money and adopting children pretty much null and void. Yet that doesn’t prevent the film’s three writers to concoct lengthy scenes involving Gru pining for cash at the Supervillain Savings & Loan Office and adopting children. He’s a supervillain — just steal what you want, dummy!

The writers also go to great lengths to show Gru as just another member of the community even though he uses Bond weapons on the Starbucks line, his car is propelled by a Saturn V rocket booster and his house, looking creepier than Dracula’s tool shed, is clearly not HOA compliant. No one involved in this movie considered how irrational it looked to have a supervillain doing villainy in suburbia while the neighbors simply gawked in disbelief in their Izod polos.

And what does Gru or any other supervillain get out of stealing the Pyramids? Or the moon? Is there some kind of ransom? Does the moon hold some larger purpose? Is it a conspiracy to disrupt surf contests? The answer to all these questions is the same: the writers didn’t want you to use your brain while watching this movie, so don’t ask. The internal logic of the film makes absolutely no sense. It’s a flawed concept that wasn’t properly flow-charted by someone who was in a position to question the logic of what happens.

So what does happen: Gru wants to steal the moon, but first he must fake-adopt the children capable of stealing a gun that shrinks things. The gun must also be used as collateral for his moon-stealing loan. He adopts the three little girls and, of course, grows attached to them even though he’s using them for his nefarious plot. The movie excuses Gru’s behavior by making the kids sweet little orphans who are being used in some equally nefarious Mary Kay-like pyramid scheme. So actually Gru’s not that bad and the kids show up to play with lasers, sleep in hollowed out bombs and disrupt his life in all the right ways. And by the end, he’s still a villain, just a villain with three kids.

The movie’s animation is engaging and colorful, although the horrific 3-D darkens all those pretty colors into a soupy mud. I did love the Minions, Gru’s chatty jumpsuit-clad henchmen, who occupy every frame like little yelping gnats that are summoned by Gru’s call. And speaking of Gru, Steve Carell proves something I’ve known for a long time: major stars should stop doing character voices in animated films.

I didn’t much care for Despicable Me. It yawned out a story that made absolutely no sense, and the writers need to be taken to task over it. Will parents like it? Not nearly as much as a Pixar movie, which has more creativity in its brow sweat than this film’s entire life cycle. But will children like it? Of course, because it has a fart gun that will make your 8-year-old howl with delight.

Where is the Wonder in this dark land?

Tim Burton’s library must be a mess. A long time ago he reached for Alice in Wonderland on a shelf and inadvertently grabbed a Chronicles of Narnia. That accident is preserved for us in his charmless and vapid retelling of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a book far wittier than Tim Burton’s version will allow us to believe.

If you recall, Carroll’s book was about a girl encountering, via rabbit hole, a dream-like repertory of silliness: absurdist wordplay, nonsensical double-talk, riddling puns and punning riddles, and bizarre tests of logic. It’s no wonder the drug culture of the ’60s seized on the elements of the story for their hallucinogenic properties (see Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”).

But Burton, master of all of things gothic and ghouly for suicidal emo-inflicted adolescents, deviates around much of Alice’s central themes so he can, of all things, create a clunky fantasy-adventure in the spirit of Lord of the Rings or one of the Narnia movies, complete with magical swords, talking animals, epic army battles and the required dragon slaying. And, as if to add injury to insult, I found Mad Hatter Johnny Depp, Burton’s favorite muse, to be an absolute bore.

And it started so promising, too, with young Mia Wasikowska as the domineering, free-spirited Alice fleeing a marriage proposal and tumbling down that famous rabbit hole into the fantastic world of Wonderland. Although Alice spends a ridiculous amount of time shrinking and enlarging into and out of her dress — I hope those hems are reinforced — she’s a plucky heroine who’s given a curiosity level proportionate to that of Wonderland’s unusual oddities.

And there are many oddities. Consider Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Matt Lucas), who are so round and doughy that a pizza chef might cover them with flour and flatten them. All of Carroll’s other creations are accounted for as well: the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the army of playing cards (shouldn't the villain be the Ace of Spades?), flamingos and hedgehogs that complete a croquet set, a slippery and evaporating Cheshire Cat, and the White Rabbit, who to my recollection never says “We’re late.”

Dare I forget Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, whose role is enlarged needlessly to give Depp the screen time his audience feels he deserves. Depp — cowering behind a silly lisp, a Carrot Top fright wig and what must be gallons of makeup — does nothing for the story outside of his tea party scene, and even there he’s pushing it as he stomps over the teapots and dodges thrown saucers. Yes, the Burton/Depp legacy goes way back, but after this and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, maybe it’s time for the pair to work apart more often.

The world of Wonderland, which looks a lot like Avatar’s Pandora because they were designed by some of the same people, is gloomy and dark even as plants with neon blooms and glowing mushrooms drape the scenery. Blame the 3-D process, which makes the picture dark and muddy and then requires audiences to wear sunglasses to view it. Even a bright movie like Up was dimmed by the 3-D glasses, so a trademark Burton film is turned hopelessly murky for a 3-D effect that wasn’t even that noticeable. If you have an option, see Alice in regular ol’ 2-D.

The first half of the film seems to function as we remember the book and the other films functioning: Alice is sucked into Wonderland where she reacts to the strangeness around her with her quirky intelligence and innocence. Toward the middle of Burton’s film, though, he turns it into a fantasy adventure by requiring Alice to rescue characters from dungeons and slay monsters with special swords. It’s as if Burton felt obligated to keep his Alice in Wonderland from being too smart for its own good, so he threw in some battles and chases. Shame on directors for thinking that’s what’s needed in any film.

Driving home the third act is Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, whose head is as abnormally large as her temper. Out of self-pity and jealousy of her sister, the White Queen — a goth-accented Anne Hathaway — the Red Queen is determined to rule Wonderland with an iron fist. She plans to use a dragon that only Alice can destroy, which of course sets off a race to kill Alice by "offing her head" or stopping her from stealing the only sword that can slay the dragon. It’s all mindless fantasy fare, and could have been left out completely. However, I did like the Red Queen’s castle, which is full of legless tables and chairs; holding them up are little monkeys or pot-bellied pigs.

Although I loved Wasikowska as Alice and some of the minor characters, I’m concerned at the liberties Burton took with his Alice in Wonderland. Not because he deviates from the book, which is fine by me, but because he changes the tone of the book into this glowing mess of mediocrity. The book was unique because it was free of the elements Burton seemed so inclined to add into his version.

For years I’ve said that Hollywood was going to do an action-adventure version of the Bible, maybe with Bruce Willis as a sword-wielding Moses and perhaps Zac Efron as a joke-hurling Jesus — maybe Michael Bay can direct. This version of Alice in Wonderland is an evolutionary step in that direction.

(All the photos with this review are reproduced here exactly as the studio sent them out. You can see for yourself how dark the film is. Now look at pictures with sunglasses on to appreciate the whole 3-D effect.)

Up, up and away: Pixar does it again

Another Pixar movie and another grueling stress test on my thesaurus — “beautiful” can only be written so many ways in so many reviews. For Up, I think “resplendent” is a fitting variation.

Once again, Pixar’s animators and storytellers have outdone themselves with this dreamy, wide-eyed wonder of an adventure tale starring, who else, a plucky octogenarian and Boy Scout geekus who’s missing his Assist an Octogenarian Across the Street Merit Badge — “You’re going to feel so assisted,” he tells the man many years his senior. These are hardly the superheroes of other animated movies, which is why they work so wonderfully in this crowd-pleasing triumph of a film that transcends the adventure it so easily dispenses.

The animators dream as children dream: in vibrant colors, peppy cartoonish motions, panoramic vistas and easy-to-understand language, all of it skewed slightly off center, like a picture frame hanging ever so slightly to one direction, with the result being some strangely shaped characters and a tilted sense of humor. And, of course, the dogs talk, but there’s a logical explanation for that.

The old man is Carl Fredrickson (Edward Asner). He probably looks like your grandfather, or a caricature of your grandfather, with these big square mitts, a pinkish nose as a round as a baseball and a chin so horizontal and level he could be a carpenter and he wouldn’t have to carry as many tools. He’s assembled with a broad collection of old-man gags: his front door is dead-bolted with primary and secondary locks with reserves and backups just in case, his teeth are kept in a jar at night, and his cane’s feet are fitted with tennis balls, Wilsons I think. Although we never see how he carries his money around, we can assume that it’s in one of those little rubber pinch purses. He may be old, and a widower, but he’s no crotchety miser; he has a tender, albeit grumpy, countenance and the soul of a kitten.

Carl’s home is being encroached on by big business — Enron, Countrywide, Starbucks, take your pick — so rather than be the victim of an open-and-shut eminent domain case he harnesses thousands of helium balloons to his house and floats right out of town. The Boy Scout (Up’s version is Wilderness Explorer) is found stuck on the porch at a cruising altitude of 5,000 feet. His name is Russell (Jordan Nagai) and “precocious” only begins to crack him. He admires Carl’s flying home: “Wow! Most people take a plane, but you took your whole house so you could bring your TVs and clocks and stuff.”

After they land, Russell goes into Wilderness Explorer mode as he puts together a tent and, like all tents, the poles are in control of the construction at all times. The scene ends with the poles erected up through Russell’s shirt and catapulting the rest of the parts out of sight into a canyon, a conclusion so realistic that camping enthusiasts will nod in agreement. Russell, not an ounce of gloom in his eyes, says dryly, “Tents are hard,” and then bounces back as if nothing happened. He’s a cute kid, for sure, but his rejuvenating optimism fills Up’s bedsheet sails.

Carl and Russell, separated in age by about seven decades, soar off to South America — Russell: “It’s like America, but south” — to find a lost rainforest where Carl can read his AARP magazines in peace. (Although, it's unlikely he'll be able to pick up a signal carrying Lawrence Welk.) The adventure leads them into the clutches of a long-forgotten explorer, a giant bird named Kevin, a zeppelin complete with an on-board dinosaur fossil museum, and a colony of dogs wearing special collars that translate their doggy brain waves into English, Japanese, or Hillbilly … whatever the occasion calls for.

Some of the dog scenes went on a little long for my taste, but that’s as close I’ll let a complaint get to Up, a breathless delight of a picture that endears itself to us with its lovable heroes with real personalities and swashbuckling adventure. Children will adore all the high-speed chases and aerial battles, but the adults will be drawn to the stars, mainly Carl Fredrickson.

The film sets up Carl in a way I wasn’t expecting, through a wordless musical montage that flashes back on his childhood, right after he first encounters Ellie, the girl that will eventually become his wife. They meet as youngsters, sprint through adolescence together, marry and then splash each other’s lives with joy so endurable it never leaves the screen, even when the wife does. In one small little scene, the passage of time is gauged by the tying of Carl’s ties. One day he’s a young man, and a dozen or so ties later the camera pans up and he’s gray and wrinkled. What happens next is a Bambi moment handled in a brave, yet entirely honest, way. If you don’t cry, or if microbes of moisture don’t appear somewhere on your eyeballs, then you’re a Cylon or a terminator or some kind of mechanical can crusher. It’s poetic, heartbreaking and, yes, beautiful.

Up also moves a mile-a-minute, especially with its jokes, which seem to come bounding out of the jungle from all directions. Some of the humor is simple visual gags, like flamingo-looking Kevin mimicking Carl and thumping his head with its beak. And then some of it is deadpan irony at a level that’s almost sinister. For instance, one of the talking dogs, Dug, tells a joke with this punch line: “It is funny ’cause the squirrel is dead.” The setup, which I will let you discover, is brutal and maybe not all that funny, but its inclusion in a film like Up seems noteworthy.

Above all else, Up’s creativity is exquisite. The way the house is brought into and out of the picture must have been a challenge for writers, yet here it all makes complete sense. And the house provides most of Up’s visual language: Carl steering it through the clouds, him and Russell dragging the floating residence through the jungle with a garden hose, camping underneath it during a rainstorm, the look on Carl’s face as balloons periodically pop and the porch hangs even closer to the ground. Homes are just vessels for our lives, and this home is a vessel for the whole film, yet also so much more.

No studio in the history of filmmaking is this consistent. Each new Pixar film is a treasure, and each new character is a gem. Meanwhile, box office analysts say Pixar can’t make money or win hearts with loveable monsters (Monsters Inc.), robots that communicate non-verbally (Wall•E) or geriatric seniors and their nerdy Wilderness Explorer helpers. What do the analysts want, demographic studies showing that children want slang-spewing, spiky-haired ’tweens on skateboards? That’s what’s going to kill the Disney Channel, but not Pixar.

Not Pixar.

Monsters vs. Aliens vs. Snot vs. Poop

Monsters vs. Aliens cuts a wide swath through comedy. One character is called General W.R. Monger, like warmonger, while a brainy scientist says the exclamatory phrase “by Hawkins’ chair,” an offbeat reference to physicist Stephen Hawking, who’s mapped the galaxy from a wheelchair nearly all his life. Brainy stuff for sure. And then a giant insect shoots snot rockets from its nose.

At times, the animated film can’t decide who the material is geared for: the kiddies being brought to see it or the adults doing the bringing. In one scene military experts are looking for science experts when someone says, “call India.” Many adults won’t get the joke — that India produces some of the world’s most gifted science and engineering minds — let alone children, who spent the car ride to the theater checking their nostrils for space invaders. To counterbalance that gag, the president of the United States goes from DEFCON 1 to “Code Brown” because he’s soiled his slacks, and a blob of ooze has to be reminded that “boys don’t have boobies.”

How frustrating this is! Last week I had a conversation with several people who wouldn’t have taken their grandchildren to see the magical Coraline, a far superior movie, had they known two buxom characters strip down to their undies to do an innocuous trapeze act. Yet here, the president poops himself to comic effect and I betcha no one complains. Better animated films (especially those by Pixar) balance the humor more precisely: The jokes are just smart enough for adults and just silly enough for children without going overboard in either direction.

Here I am, though, halfway through a review and I’ve yet to talk plot: An alien super villain tries to colonize the planet so the government sends in monsters it has collected to suppress the threat. The monsters are the fishy Missing Link (Will Arnett), the human roach Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a gelatinous blob named B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a giant furball called Insectasaurus and the 50-foot-tall woman, whose “official government-sanctioned monster name” is Ginormica, but call her Susan (Reese Witherspoon). They live in an underground government facility so vast and labyrinthine that it epitomizes Eisenhower’s definition of the Military Industrial Complex.

Susan is the central character and the way the movie plots her arc from bride-to-be to Ginormica is effective, if also kinda sad. I felt bad for Susan, the way she’s treated by her moronic TV weatherman fiancé, the way she’s hidden in a secret government facility, the way she loses everything except the friendship of the other monsters. She comes into her own, though, and eventually tussles with a giant robot in San Francisco — a fantastic scene — and then the alien geekus Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson). The sequel must give her a new groom, and maybe he’ll be as tall as her.

I must also comment on the voice acting, which I often fault in animated movies that include celebrity voices. These voices are perfect for these roles, especially Rogen, a convincing dunce, and Witherspoon, whose chirpy tones are just colorful enough for those animated frames.

Some of the humor is clearly of the lowest-common denominator kind — anything with snot or poop — but some of it is pretty clever: A headline about the alien invasion reads “U-F-Uh-Oh.” A man scans his iris, thumbprint, palmprint, elbow, tongue and butt to gain access to a war room that looks like the war room from Dr. Strangelove. B.O.B. the blob is capable of all kinds of contortions and bizarre visual gags, one of which involves the hilarious, context-free line, “I taste ham,” the meaning of which I will let you discover.

Really, though, Monsters vs. Aliens is a rather mellow spoof. The monsters are mutated devices from other movies: The Fly, The Blob, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Thing, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and Cloverfield. Notice the clever Vertigo parody as Susan runs across rooftops in San Francisco and dangles from a rain gutter only to realize she’s nearly as tall as the building itself. Or how the alien’s computer is accessed using one of those step pads from that dancing arcade game. Or how the president communicates with a giant robot using the musical notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and when that doesn’t work he busts out with the Beverly Hills Cop theme on his Casio keyboard. Try to listen for the really obscure line about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

These are amusing jokes, but it all relates back to my original point: Will children get them? I think not, which is why Monsters vs. Aliens is peppered with potty humor as well, maybe as a backup. The animation looks good, the action flows well, the monsters are likeable (especially B.O.B., who falls in love with a Jell-O mold), but the film’s sense of humor needs a narrower focus. Or just less snot.

This review originally ran in the West Valley View March 27, 2009.

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.