Philm Club Series: Coraline

Film screenings by the Philm Club continues with the third film of the "Children’s Morality, Sensibility and Sentiments" film series. (*)
Coraline
Directed by Henry Selick (2009)
100 min.
February 3 Friday, at 18:00, Zrinyi 14, Room 412

Well-known for directing the Tim Burton film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Selick welcomes the audience again with an astonishing 3D stop-motion animation based on the graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean.

“The movie tells the story of a blue-haired young girl by the name of Coraline Jones (voice of Dakota Fanning), who has moved to an out-of-the-way, 150-year old mansion in Oregon. Unlike the usual animated heroine, she’s not sugar and spice and everything nice; Coraline has a nasty side that peeks through at times (most notably in her treatment of others). Her mother (Teri Hatcher) and father (John Hodgman) are writers with little time for their daughter, so Coraline is left on her own to explore the house and its grounds. [...] One day, Coraline discovers a hidden door that appears to lead nowhere; the opening has been bricked up. That night, however, a portal opens behind the door that transports Coraline to a strange world of unsuspected wonders, where her ‘Other Mother’ and ‘Other Father’ are interested in only pleasing her and things are warm, beautiful, and colorful. But the time-honored cliché applies: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” (James Berardinelli, [1])

“Like [Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch] Mr. Selick is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama.” (A. O. Scott, [2])