Friday
Feb062009
Friday, February 6, 2009 at 12:35AM Movie Review - 'Coraline'
| Coraline
Featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and John Hodgman  |
There is a revitalization of 3-D in Hollywood. Whether or not that stretches out to the rest of the country remains to be seen. It has already been an interesting year for the resurgent technology; the horror movie My Bloody Valentine might be the best example of live action 3-D ever made, but during the Super Bowl, you could wear cheap glasses and watch the disastrous 3-D commercial for Monsters vs. Aliens.
And now there’s Coraline
, one of 21 3-D releases this year. What’s puzzling is that this film doesn’t need 3-D and stranger still, doesn’t even try to take advantage of it. Whereas Bloody Valentine is conscious of the fact that you’ve got glasses strapped to your head and therefore pushes the action out of the screen and in your direction, Coraline avoids such gimmicks, which is more authentic to the story, perhaps, but wastes a golden opportunity to explore the functionality of the form with stop-motion animation.
Coraline is written and directed by Henry Selick
, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is often wrongly attributed to one of its producers, Tim Burton. Selick is known for his work with miniatures, and they're beyond excellent in this film. One thing he's not known for, though, is screenwriting, and Coraline could be crisper and more lively.
For his subject, Selick has adapted a modern twist on Alice in Wonderland by Neil Gaiman
(who wrote the book on which Stardust is based, as well) and brought it into his world of tiny puppets painstakingly positioned and manipulated as actors. Selick has gone one better, by seamlessly combining his stop-motion work with top notch computer animation.
