Coraline

This last weekend I saw Coraline, the new stop-motion horror/fantasy film by Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Coraline Jones is the daughter of two workaholic parents who just moved into a house out in the middle of some untended woods. Coraline is unhappy with her family. Her parents don't pay her any attention and she misses her friends from home. She wishes she could lead a different life. Her wish comes true when she finds a small door that leads to a world that looks similar to the world she lives in, only everything she ever dreamed about is true. Her parents are more lively and more attentive to her, and they give her everything she wishes. There's a giant garden outside, and her neighbors own a theater and a circus that put on shows that are a wonder to behold. The only thing she finds odd is that everybody on this world has buttons for eyes. She soon realizes that everything she ever imagined is just a trap to lead her away from what is important.
Coraline is the first feature film from Laika, a studio owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, and specializes in commercials, short films, music videos and now feature films. It used to be called Vinton Studios back in the 90's. It's comprised of 30 animators and their characters include M&M's, Frosted Mini-Wheats, and Hostess Penguin. Henry Selick previously worked on their short film Moongirl. Coraline was distributed by Focus Features, which is the art house film division of NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, which is owned by General Electrics. It has distributed films such as Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation, Milk, Gosford Park and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as well as several foreign films in the United States.
The film is based on a novel by Neil Gaiman, author of novels such as Stardust, The Sandman and The Graveyard Books. He paints an unpleasant world with characters that are not necessarily pleasant. Coraline is a brat, which is apparent from the moment she speaks. I found her initial scenes in the real world and with her parents to be extremely unpleasant, and I was ready to give up on this movie, but I knew that there was fantasy coming, so I decided to wait and see what that had to offer, and as soon as Coraline walks into this "Other World" where this film comes to life. There's so much imagination, so much playfulness and so much at stake in this world, that it simply sucks you into the adventure and you start caring about Coraline, because no matter what kind of brat she might be, no girl deserves to go through what she's forced to go through.
The film has a really hard time finding its focus when it stays grounded per se, which includes the writing in alot of the aftermath (not to spoil what actually happens and the trap that is set in the film), but all I have to say is that this film is most at home when it's relying on visual spectacle rather than story, and there are those moments where it can handle both quite well, but without the visual spectacle and the imagination is when this film feels a little weak. It's a very worthy film for me to open the year 2009 (I skipped everything that came before in order to catch up on some 2008 films), with some flaws, but when it marvels, it marvels.