Monday, February 23, 2009

Coraline (2009)

This is definitely worth taking some trouble to see in 3D, so you have a limited time available before the 3D theaters get taken over by the Jonas Brothers on February 27. The 3D complements the corporeality of stop motion animation, and is used with intelligence to underline the difference between Coraline’s real and alternate worlds.

Darker than Nightmare Before Christmas, and the monstrousness is not as jolly, if you are thinking of taking small children. If you are the sort of person that enjoyed Nightmare Before Christmas, this is well worth seeing.

It’s good to see Selick working out from Tim Burton’s shadow: they’ve got a similar sensibility and esthetic in a lot of ways, but Selick is a fine director in his own right. This film made me appreciate how much Nightmare owed to Selick’s direction, even though Burton got top billing as producer and writer and contributed a lot of the character design.

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