Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

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