Coraline: Far Creepier Than Any Kids Movie Has A Right To Be

Coraline is a stop motion animation movie based on a story written by Neil Gaiman, another of my favorite authors. The story starts off with Coraline, (pronounced similar to Caroline, with the last syllable pronounced like "clothes line") moving to the "Pink Palace" with her parents, who are trying to make a living writing a seed catalog, yet apparently hate the concept of gardening. I find it funny that the parents seldom work in the same room together, and while mom works on the kitchen table using a moderin-ish laptop, dad works upstairs in a "study" with mountains of papers, while tapping on an ancient beige desktop computer using a monochrome green monitor display.

Coraline is your typical little girl, in that she is charming, incorrigible, and has no patience. Add onto that the fact that she's been moved to this new place, with no friends, and nothing's yet unpacked. She soon makes the acquaintance of Wybie, the grandson of the landlord, who lets her in a secret that as a rule, no one with children is allowed to rent out any of the rooms of the Pink Palace, on account of his grand aunt disappearing while his grandma was a little girl and living there. Shortly after he gives Coraline a doll that his grandmother had that resembles Coraline.

In short order, Coraline discovers a door that leads to an alternate world, with replicas of her parents, Wybie, and the other tennants of the Pink Palace, as well as the Palace itself, except here everything is fully functional, and splendidly made up, as opposed to the rather shabber state of things in the real world. There are a number of very subtly creepy things going on here, but the most disturbing thing is that everyone here looks normal, except their eyes have all been replaced with buttons.

Eventually it turns into a great adventure, with a battle, and many surprisingly horrific things occuring on both sides of the door.

One last thing that I will point out, is that there is very mangy chewed up black cat, that can apparently travel between worlds at will, and when he's in the other world, he can talk, with the voice of Keith David, which you may remember from my review of They Live. There's no 10 minute fight sequence over the cat putting on some sunglasses, but he gives an unexpected voice to the cat, which works surprisingly well.

Overall, I'd highly recommend watching it.

Comments

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

What It's Like To Get Pipebombed

Well, I'm going to break with my rule of not actually mentioning anything about having a pipe thrown at you, but in celebration of the 6 month anniversary, I really wanted to write it up. So, without further ado, here's what happened on my Fourth of July 2009, and the six months since: So, it's the Fourth of July, 2009, about ten-ish or so at night. Being that we live in a condo, and our homeowner's association has prohibited fireworks being let off in our complex, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood in order to better see the fireworks everyone else was letting off. We walked straight out the front gate, got about maybe 50 feet down the street, and a dark car with it's headlights on pulled out onto the street, about a block ahead of us a man with a white shirt was walking in the same direction as us, nothing noteworthy about either of those. However, upon passing us, something was tossed out of the passenger window and bounced off my chest, upon the g...

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...

Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Search This Blog