It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye

3D movies have never worked for me. Sometimes, they give me a fleeting sense of motion, but when I saw The Dark Knight in IMAX, I didn’t notice much of a difference from a regular movie screen. I remember seeing Spy Kids 3D and getting those cool glasses with one eye red and the other blue. That sometimes made it look like the characters were paper cut-outs on different planes from each other – neat, but not exactly technologically astounding.

Coraline 3D, on the other hand, popped completely out of the screen. At times I could’ve sworn paper mice on streamers were unfolding right in front of my nose, or that the Other Mother was reaching for me. Wicked.

Alas, the movie itself only picked up for me about halfway through.

Coraline is based on the book of the same name by recent Newbery-award-winning author Neil Gaiman (yay!). In her new house, a spunky girl finds a way into a delightful world where everything is exactly like hers but better: she gets to eat the food she likes, have all the fun she wants, and her Other parents pay attention to her like her real ones never do. So what if they have buttons for eyes? But Coraline soon learns that being part of this seemingly great place means paying a terrible price. Now, to save herself, her parents, and her new friends, she has to match wits with the fearsome Other Mother.

If you read kids’ books, watch family movies, or are familiar with Western myth and legend, this should sound pretty familiar. It’s Pinocchio on Pleasure Island, Persephone in Hades, the young girls at the Goblin Market: don’t eat the yummy food. Don’t go near the attractive strangers. It’s all wonderful now, but you won’t be laughing when the bill arrives.

Coraline is another of the books whose endings I didn’t really remember, and you know what that means. Funnily enough, I enjoyed the second hour of this movie much more than the first. I think the problem is, in stories like this – vulnerable protagonist succumbs to temptation and is snared by evil – the main character has to spend the first half of the story pretty much passively falling for the nasty seducer’s wiles. Gaiman does the best anyone can: Coraline has to figure out how to get in and out of the Other world, and of course she has to gather information about this one so we can see it all delightfully skewed later on. But it’s hard for me to empathize with a protagonist who isn’t fighting as hard as she can for something specific.

I guess the problem is me: I have little sympathy for “I’m so booooored! Why can’t I doooo anything!” because I’ve always been the sort of person who’s generally happy on her own, reading. (That’s right, Coraline, stop whining because you… can – go – ANYWHERE!!! Just take a look, it’s in a book, on Reading Raiiiiinbow!!!) Yeah, Coraline has a lot of positive attributes: she’s brave and smart. But she’s also at that stage where everything is divided into “cool” and “lame”, and if you happen to disagree with her ideas of these concepts, you get kind of annoyed.

Part of your sympathy for Coraline depends on feeling that her parents are being totally unfair, and this is always a hard sell for me. I’m down with it when the reader/viewer can see that the parents are being reasonable but still sympathize with the furious child or teen. For instance, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby books are great for this. Unless you’re Ramona’s age (she starts at four and, so far, the series continues until she’s nine), it’s pretty clear that the adults are being fair, but even so, you can deeply feel Ramona’s frustration and hurt feelings. She comes at things with different expectations, and she doesn’t get why the adults don’t agree.

This goes for stories of redemption, too. Even when I can see your MC’s flaws for flaws, I need to feel their position in my bones. The reader knows from the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that Edmund and Eustace are jerks, but that doesn’t stop Lewis from helping us understand why they do what they do.

So I guess Coraline and I are just incompatible people, which is fine, but it doesn’t help me to enjoy the first half of the movie apart from the astounding visuals. (Although, strangely, the fact that the visuals were so astounding was part of what made it difficult: Coraline’s “real” world is so strange and quirky that there never really seems to be a huge difference between it and the Other world. Neither is very kitchen-sink-and-dirty-dishes realistic. It’s like if muggles had really cool technologies that could levitate people and transform teachers into cats before Harry went to Hogwarts.)

But once Coraline discovered how the Other Mother was out to get her – once she had a goal – the movie yanked me right up and pulled me along. I can sympathize with a kid going off to fight evil to free her parents and friends. Yup, that seems like a passionate motivation to me. She doesn’t have much of a plan, but that doesn’t matter, as long as she reacts reasonably to everything around her. The last hour or so is a freewheeling, awesome roller-coaster ride.

(And naturally, part of what makes it awesome is the way the viewer gets to think, “Ha! I told you so!” when all the too-good-to-be-true stuff turns out to actually be dangerous and malicious.)

So, Coraline is a very pretty movie, and Coraline 3D is *that* much prettier than its 2D sister. The story ranges from being decent (at the start) to amazing (by the end). It kept my attention for the entire 100 minutes, but it didn’t always capture my heart.

Oh, wait, one more thing –

Some of the reviews that have come out mention how Coraline has some genuinely scary moments for kids. I would venture a “yeah, probably”, but if you’re over twelve, you probably don’t have anything to worry about, and, if you’re under twelve, so what*? It’s a good movie, definitely worth the possibility of a nightmare or two, and who said being scared was a bad thing, anyway? The evil characters and props are frightening, but they’re pretty-scary (not pretty scary); there’s a lot of creepiness but no actual horror. That is, you get scared bad things might happen to good people, but you always know in the back of your head that, really, they won’t, not in the end.

So why not check out this movie?

* If you’re exactly twelve, you’re not allowed to see this film. Sorry, it’s in the rules