Coraline
Review
Coraline is an animated, stop-motion film about a young
girl exploring her new home. The main
voice actors in this film are Dakota Fanning (Coraline), Teri Hatcher (Other
Mother), Jennifer Saunders (Other Spink), Dawn French (Other Forcible), KeithDavid (The Cat), John Hodgeman (Other Father), Robert Bailey Jr (Wybie), and
Ian McShane (Other Bobimsky). The
setting in Coraline takes place in Oregon.
Her house isn’t surrounded by any other houses. Coraline has a lot of
time and property to explore.
Coraline is a girl who feels neglected by her parents, so
she discovers another world to spend her time at. This “Other World” is a parallel universe
where her “Other Mother” gives her all of the attention and love she ever wanted. When Coraline first starts going to this
other world, she enjoys it so much that she doesn’t want to return to the real
world where reality takes place. In the
other world, the Other Mother cooks delicious food for Coraline, but in the
real world, her real mother makes Coraline “Slime-Like” food. In the other world, Coraline’s Other Father
plays with Coraline and sings to her, but in the real world, all that her
father wants to do is work on his projects and not have to be distracted by
Coraline.
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During the making of Coraline, the crew that makes all of
the puppets and the props for the movie are the real stars. The puppeteers spend up to an entire week
just to film seven seconds of film because after each shot they have to move
the puppet’s facial expression by just a microscopic bit so that when they put
all of the pictures together they get a nice, smooth shot. The crew used up to forty-five different
outfits for Coraline’s character. Most
of Coraline’s outfits were identical to the next one. The reason they needed so many different outfits
for Coraline was because they wanted to be one of the first movies to have
characters that have more than just one outfit for the entire film.
Throughout the entire film there were no computer
generated scenes. Everything was made in
front of the camera. Two of the most
challenging parts in creating the movie were the fog and the fire. The fog was created with dry ice filmed in
front of a black screen. The crew that
made the fog had to place black objects in front and behind different parts of
the fog to give it the full effect that it would require in the film. When the doll was placed into the firepit it
looked like the fire consumed the doll. The
fire was created through drawings then scanned into the computer where the
artist then inputted it into the film.
The hand-drawn fire took three to four weeks to create.
Coraline is an excellent and thrilling film that is
suitable for people of most ages. The
film may not be suitable for children of too young of an age due to the fact
that it could give them a gnarly scare.
The quality of the film was excellent.
It really impresses me that the movie cast did the entire film just by
taking pictures and putting them all together.
I recommend this movie to people of the age ten and up.
