Coraline 3D Movie Review

*repost from 01/28/2009

Directed by Henry Selick

Produced by Tim Burton

In theaters 02/06/2009

Im not sure if im the most qualified person to be reviewing this. Ive never seen Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach or any other thing he's done. Ive never seen the Neil Gaiman written MirrorMask or Stardust either. And on top of that I fucking hate kids movies. Even having said all of that I had a blast watching this movie.

The stop motion was phenomenal. There wasnt any of the herky jerky movement like you usually see. It was so smooth a bunch of times I thought it was cgi. The 3d was also RealD like My Bloody Valentine and it was used to perfection. The scenes popped to life and the 3d pop out moments were used during the appropriate times. The best use of 3d I saw was when Coraline was crawling in the tunnel to the other house. The walls were 3d and the hole was in the middle of the screen and it actually felt like you were being sucked into a tunnel. Ive never seen 3d work in that way before.

The movie itself is pretty simple. Its about this girl that moves into a new home and she discovers an alternate reality where her parents are really nice, the neighbors have a crazy circus show with musical numbers and flying creatures and the neighborhood cat can talk. She loves this world but soon comes to find out that her new parents want to rip her eyes out and sew on buttons. Also there is a subplot about some missing ghost children. Anyways the rest of the movie is Coraline trying to escape this nightmare world, get her parents back and free the ghost children.

Overall I think the movie was a fun children's movie. There may be parts where extremely young children may be scared but overall the movie has a good playful tone. The 3D work was awesome and the voice acting was spot on.
After the movie was over there was a Q&A session with the diretor himself: Henry Selick. Harry Knowles did a good job as the moderator and there were some excellent audience questions. There were two interesting tidbits i remember. First off the movie was not filmed with a special 3d camera. Henry said he shot each scene with two cameras, one for the right eye and one for the left eye. The other interesting fact he mentioned was that if they got 2 minutes of footage completed in one week then it was a really good productive week. In my opinion it takes a really special person to have that much patience to make a movie that took that long.

Overall it was a great experience and highly recommend it for anyone thats looking for a good kids movie to watch. I think there is stuff for both children and adults alike to watch. On a scale of 1-10 I give this a fat ass mermaid 7.9 out of 10.