The advent of CGI has made stop-motion animation an unfortunately dying art. Thankfully, there are still those artists out there who want the genre to prevail, and a damned good thing, too. If you have even a soupçon of knowledge of how these things are achieved, it's amazing how it all comes together.
What also helps is a solid, entertaining story and a creative genius behind the work. This offering from Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas*, has those in abundance. The story itself is from a book by Neil Gaiman, a chap whose name will be very well known to the written Sci-Fi/Fantasy community.
Coraline is a precocious little young lady, recently moved into a flat with her work-obsessed parents, and surrounded by an odd but friendly set of neighbours. She has a tendency to explore, which one day leads her to a hidden door. This takes her to a mirror-image flat, with a strange exception. The woman ostensibly her Mother is someone else. Her "Other Mother", with big black buttons for eyes. Her Other Father is similarly optically haberdashed, as is anything else vaguely anthropomorphic in this parallel world, including the neighbours. Coraline quickly sees that the Other Mother isn't any sort of benign entity, and this is proven by the fact that the Other Mother has captured her parents and the souls of other children. Of course, thanks to Coraline's smarts, a happy ending ensues.
The film isn't tremendously faithful to the book (for heaven's sake, America, do we HAVE to have even an implied love interest in everything your studios put out?), but it's mostly not too bad. The one bone I'd have to pick is at the end where, without wishing to give too much away, the clever, strong-willed girl has to eventually be saved by a boy. Stereotypes 1, Good strong feminist message to humankind 0. Bloody Hollywood.
Technically, however, it's cracking. The animation isn't quite as polished as The Corpse Bride, Tim Burton's last stop-motion opus, but it doesn't half do the job well. And if you can, see it in 3-D as I did (and IMAX to boot); it makes it truly stunning (or as my companion put it, feeling like you've been on acid).
Rating:
*In case you're thinking what I was, I'd always believed Tim Burton to be the driector of this movie, but it seems he was simply the producer/animator/genius behind it
Carl B Harrison
Re: Coraline
oddbodd wrote:
The advent of CGI has made stop-motion animation an unfortunately dying art. Thankfully, there are still those artists out there who want the genre to prevail, and a damned good thing, too. If you have even a soupçon of knowledge of how these things are achieved, it's amazing how it all comes together.
Tell is about it I'm just trying to get one bloody horse to walk and it's taking me blinking ages to finally work something out......sheesh and then theres every other little thing to consider. We have still got it better than they did, as I'm using computer assisted grabbing software and other compositing tools, as they did on Coraline. But what you really got to respect is, only a few years ago they were going straight to film with if they were lucky, back projected live action footage shown a frame at a time, as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen did.
I take my hat of to all stop motion protagonists.
Any hoo, I'm going to try and get to see Coraline this week if I can, prob not 3D but never the less I know I'm going to enjoy it
Oh yeah ! Youtube has some amazing makings about Coraline, did you know most of all the flowers are made out of popcorn....... well worth a looksy.
I'm just trying to get one bloody horse to walk and it's taking me blinking ages to finally work something out......sheesh and then theres every other little thing to consider. We have still got it better than they did, as I'm using computer assisted grabbing software and other compositing tools, as they did on Coraline. But what you really got to respect is, only a few years ago they were going straight to film with if they were lucky, back projected live action footage shown a frame at a time, as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen did.
