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Coraline (2009)
May. 7th, 2009 10:39 amCan you believe it? This movie was still playing in 3D here in Seattle this week, so ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
holyoutlaw and I finally got to see it. We tried a couple of months ago (before Corflu) but that showing was sold out.
So yeah, it's just as beautiful as everybody said. The 3D effects were very ... effective. The design, by director Henry Selick, was just as cool as his earlier movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. I especially liked how the design embodied the story, so it starts out drab and a bit boring (with little hints of eccentricity thrown in), then blossoms out into a bright, energetic, magnificent fantasia, and finally twists the fantasia into something distorted and disturbing, before alighting on a bright, cheerful, conventional ending.
One thing I've been thinking about this morning -- the one thing that has been nagging at me, so to speak -- is the Other Mother. What does she represent? My first take is that she is Coraline's fantasy of the perfect mother. The lesson of the movie seems to be that our fantasies are dangerous. I think one of the things that nags at me about the Other Mother is that she also represents Coraline herself -- or her attempt to be a mother to herself. Coraline learns that she isn't ready for autonomy yet; she still needs her mother to survive in a dangerous world.
It's interesting to me to contrast this movie with Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In that movie the parents are utterly dysfunctional and unable to help their daughter. She is forced to be her own mother, and like Coraline she does this in the realm of the imagination and creates an alternative family there. That family, too, is dysfunctional, but she knows how to survive in a dysfunctional situation. In the end she is enfolded in the arms of a new, middle class mother, but the final image is of embers reflected in her eyes. She still has her imagination and spirit to rely on. Coraline too is still in control of the story at the end. Her parents and the other adults are planting the garden that she wants, and she has a story to tell to the old granny. Yet she appears to have disavowed imagination and fantasy. She is settling for the safer realm of garden and family. Probably a good message for children, but perhaps less satisfactory to restless adults.
C. Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark recently did a series of posts on Women in Wonderland, in which he wrote about a variety of movies (and one pornographic graphic novel) on the theme. I particularly admired his discovery of Alice in Wonderland at the heart of Hitchcock's Psycho. Amongst other things he writes about MirrorMask, Pan's Labyrinth, and Coraline as representing a new burst of interest in cinematic exploration of Women in Wonderland. Throw in Tideland, and perhaps you begin to see the outline of a wave. The role of the mother in all of these films would be a worthy subject for a comparative essay. One of the things I really disliked about Pan's Labyrinth was the unsympathetic and to my mind disrespectful treatment of the mother. Not sure if that says more about the movie or about me!
holyoutlaw and I finally got to see it. We tried a couple of months ago (before Corflu) but that showing was sold out.So yeah, it's just as beautiful as everybody said. The 3D effects were very ... effective. The design, by director Henry Selick, was just as cool as his earlier movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. I especially liked how the design embodied the story, so it starts out drab and a bit boring (with little hints of eccentricity thrown in), then blossoms out into a bright, energetic, magnificent fantasia, and finally twists the fantasia into something distorted and disturbing, before alighting on a bright, cheerful, conventional ending.
One thing I've been thinking about this morning -- the one thing that has been nagging at me, so to speak -- is the Other Mother. What does she represent? My first take is that she is Coraline's fantasy of the perfect mother. The lesson of the movie seems to be that our fantasies are dangerous. I think one of the things that nags at me about the Other Mother is that she also represents Coraline herself -- or her attempt to be a mother to herself. Coraline learns that she isn't ready for autonomy yet; she still needs her mother to survive in a dangerous world.
It's interesting to me to contrast this movie with Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In that movie the parents are utterly dysfunctional and unable to help their daughter. She is forced to be her own mother, and like Coraline she does this in the realm of the imagination and creates an alternative family there. That family, too, is dysfunctional, but she knows how to survive in a dysfunctional situation. In the end she is enfolded in the arms of a new, middle class mother, but the final image is of embers reflected in her eyes. She still has her imagination and spirit to rely on. Coraline too is still in control of the story at the end. Her parents and the other adults are planting the garden that she wants, and she has a story to tell to the old granny. Yet she appears to have disavowed imagination and fantasy. She is settling for the safer realm of garden and family. Probably a good message for children, but perhaps less satisfactory to restless adults.
C. Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark recently did a series of posts on Women in Wonderland, in which he wrote about a variety of movies (and one pornographic graphic novel) on the theme. I particularly admired his discovery of Alice in Wonderland at the heart of Hitchcock's Psycho. Amongst other things he writes about MirrorMask, Pan's Labyrinth, and Coraline as representing a new burst of interest in cinematic exploration of Women in Wonderland. Throw in Tideland, and perhaps you begin to see the outline of a wave. The role of the mother in all of these films would be a worthy subject for a comparative essay. One of the things I really disliked about Pan's Labyrinth was the unsympathetic and to my mind disrespectful treatment of the mother. Not sure if that says more about the movie or about me!
