Coraline

Coraline is a 2009 American stop-motion animated dark fantasy film directed by Henry Selick and produced by Laika, adapted from Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella of the same name. It follows Coraline Jones, an adventurous eleven-year-old girl who has moved with her parents, Mel and Charlie, into the Pink Palace Apartments in Ashland, Oregon. Frustrated by her parents’ work and by the isolation of her new home, Coraline discovers a small door that opens onto an alternate version of her life.

On the other side, the Other Mother, voiced by Teri Hatcher, and the Other Father offer attention, elaborate meals, and a colorful household. Their black button eyes, however, signal the bargain behind the apparent kindness: Coraline must allow buttons to be sewn over her own eyes if she wishes to remain. As the Other World decays, she learns that the Other Mother, also called the Beldam, has imprisoned the ghost children of earlier victims and taken their eyes.

Coraline’s allies include Wybie Lovat, a character created for the film and voiced by Robert Bailey Jr.; a talking black cat voiced by Keith David; and her eccentric neighbors, retired stage performers Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, voiced by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, plus circus performer Mr. Bobinsky, voiced by Ian McShane. To save her parents and the ghosts, Coraline challenges the Beldam to a game, finds the missing eyes, and escapes through the door. In the climax, she prevents the severed Other Mother’s hand from recovering the key, dropping it into an old well.

Selick, who had previously directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, brought the story to the screen using physical puppets, miniature sets, and stereoscopic 3D photography. Coraline was Laika’s first feature film and was released in the United States on February 6, 2009. The production used replacement faces to create expressions; Laika reported that 207,336 possible facial-expression combinations could be made from interchangeable upper and lower face pieces, an innovation that let Coraline’s puppet display unusually subtle reactions throughout the film, while the animators photographed each tiny adjustment one frame at a time for the final performance seen by audiences in theaters worldwide that year. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature and a BAFTA nomination for Best Animated Film. Its music was composed by Bruno Coulais, whose score includes deliberately invented, nonsensical choral lyrics rather than a conventional spoken language.

The film’s visual contrast between the drab real world and the seductive Other World supports Coraline’s changing view of her family. By the ending, she values her imperfect parents and joins the Pink Palace residents for a garden party built around the neighbors' shared planting.