Coraline is charming and sinister all at once - part of a wave of gothic (horror) animation squired by Tim Burton and his peers. Unlike your average Disney/Pixar fare, they give prominence to the subtle presence of evil in the world, integrating sins such as gluttony and curiosity to disturbing effect. I rarely laugh during these movies because I've noticed the trick of the filmmakers to shift from funny to strange and uneasy just as I'm drawing breath from my first chuckle. In contrast to the Disney movie, the real drama of these animated stories takes place beneath the surface of dancing images.
As if to corroborate, there were no children whatsoever in the theatre. My guess is that a psychological subtext wards off cautious parents. But to be fair, "Coraline" brings the menaces up front: if she doesn't rescue the souls of three children and save her parents, she will have buttons sewn onto her eyes and be trapped in the "Other World" she has wandered into. The threat is manifest to ghastly effect on her accomplice, whose glass-button eyes hover over a mouth pin-tucked into a permanent smile.
Again, the physical damage is just the tip of the iceberg. We are invited to imagine the pain of these horrific surgeries, but Selick underscores what it would actually mean to lose your eyes, to lose the ability to smile or frown at your own volition--it's free will, as much as the ability to express emotion, that Coraline has to fight to retain.
To my mind there's a clear difference between the fear factor of Cruella Deville the animated character and C.D. as played by Glenn Close. With no disservice to Ms. Close, the cartoon is by far the more terrifying.
For all their effects and lifelike qualities, animated movies still prompt us to enter the world imagined. It's a place where characters have long spindly fingers that belong in our nightmares, where the crescent moon looks sharp and menacing, and the forest is a den of darkness and danger. An evil character in the flesh invites our compassion - here too is a soul suffering the burdens of mortality, of bad parenting, of social anxiety, of psychological decay. With animated figures we have no such braille with with to decipher the nature of good and evil.
One final point I'd like to make is that it struck me in watching "Coraline" that most gothic/horror movies in the adult world result in characters fleeing evil. I have strong visual of women running from slashers, of people struggling with doorknobs, and screams in the woods as handheld cameras jostle forward. In this movie I sat in stock terror, wondering how an 11-year-old was going to save not only her parents but three children from the "Other World." The wonderful thing about Coraline the character is that she's so full of pluck. "Be brave, Coraline," she encourages herself; or "come on, Coraline!" at a moment of panic. How many times do we see a character teach herself to be brave?
To watch her I was in awe of how beautifully the filmmakers handle their protagonist: they present a chatty, inquisitive child who learns the price of following her imagination too far, and then they enable us to witness her resilience and ingenuity in saving both herself and those she loves. Of course there's magic and helping hands along the way, but the cleverness of it all is that there's a lot of common sense too. In fact, as Selick reminds us, it's common sense and pluck that can free Coraline - and us - from the pull of a destructive imagination.
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