Coraline Movie Review

Dakota Fanning standing next
 a miniature figurine of Coraline 

     Coraline is an animated film that was based on a book, written by Neil Gailman, and produced by Claire Jennings, Harry Linden, Bill Mechanic, Mary Sandell.Henry Selick, and Michael Zoumas in 2009. This movie is rated PG because it contains scary images, has suggestive humor, some inappropriate language, and has thematic elements. The stars of this movie are Dakota Fanning, who voices the main character Coraline, Teri Hatcher, who voices Coraline's mother, and John Hodgman, who voices Coraline's father. In this movie, the main character Coraline, is a little girl who is very adventurous and finds another world that she wishes she lived in but she soon finds out that their are many secrets in this "perfect" world.

Pink Palace

     At the beginning of the movie, we find out that a young girl by the name of Coraline has just moved into a new home with her parents and it is called "The Pink Palace". We find out fairly quickly that she feels alone because she has just moved away from all of her friends, she is an only child, and and her parents are to involved in their work that they don't really pay attention to her. Coraline ends up finding a secret door that leads to a whole other world. This world is the world that she imagines how her life should be. When she enters this new world, she finds herself in a better version of her home with her mother singing and cooking a wholesome meal in the kitchen. This is something that she had always wished her real mother had done. She found her father up in the spare room playing the piano. in the real world, this room is actually his office where he would normally be working on writing his books for work. In this other world, Coraline thinks that this is a perfect life and everything is great, but after a few visits, she comes to realize that it is quite the opposite. Her other parents are not really who she thinks they are, the beautiful garden in the backyard is actually evil, and her interesting neighbors are not really amazing and talented as she thought they were. After many obsticles and challenges, she finally returns home and realizes that her life isn't actually as bad as she thought it was.

Teri Hatcher standing next
to the miniature figurine
of Coraline's mother

     Throughout this movie there were many different elements that the stage crew and director had to work with. This was not filmed like a regular movie where there are actors that are filmed and thats the end. This movie did not have actors or actresses but figurines playing the roles of the characters. This made it very difficult to film because each scene in the movie was taken frame by frame and put together to make it seem like things in the movie were actually moving. The set and characters all had to be proportionate to one another so that the movie seemed somewhat like real life. The clothes were very difficult to make because they had to fit each character the right way and there were many different characters that all had numerous wardrobe changes. This meant that the crew had to make hundreds of different costumes for all the characters. Also, there were many different facial expressions for each person and each expression had to be designed by specialists. This also took many hours and hundreds of different faces for all of the characters.

John Hodgman standing standing
 next to the miniature figurine
 of Coraline's father

     I can see that a lot of hard work and dedication went into this movie and I really enjoyed seeing how it all came together in the end.  The characters, voices overs, and scenes were fantastic. the filming and acting were good, the only thing a didn't really like about the movie was the story line. I did not like that a poor little girl who is sad and alone at home enters a world that she only dreamed about and then has all of her dreams destroyed. It broke my hear to see that this sweet girl was neglected by her parents and she had moved away from all of her friends. When she found the other world, I was finally excite that Coraline was happy and could enjoy her life. Then it turned out that the world she thought was perfect ended up all being a lie. She wasn't happy in real life and she wasn't happy in the other world either. I feel very disturbed that this young girl has so many issue's and i don't really understand the meaning behind this movie.