Coraline February 8, 2009
Posted by museandwaffles in Movies, Unaided Trippiness.Tags: Coraline, Neil Gaiman
2 comments
Hey, everybody! Go see Coraline. It’s awesome!
Bill and I went yesterday and saw it in 3-D and everything. The visuals look incredible and it has a great storyline that can be interpreted in many different ways. The score is also interesting, for all those soundtrack nerds out there. Though it is animated, it is definitely not a kid’s movie exclusively, because of the variety of meanings, etc. One thing I didn’t understand is that the audience didn’t seem to follow most of the funny parts. Bill and I would be totally guffawing and everyone else would be staring mindlessly at the screen, kind of like when you watch one of those “Don’t Smoke Weed” commercials in the theatre and no one seems to get the funniness except you. Staring mindlessly…this brings me to my interpretations of the story (a story by none other than the great Neil Gaiman).
Those familiar with Mew might recognize this line from “The Saviours of Jazz Ballet:” ‘Hollow hearts make for pleasant lives.’ One of the interpretations that I brought away from the movie is the idea of put-on blind optimism being an easier, but fake way of living. Had Coraline sewed the buttons on her eyes and taken away her true vision, she could have lived in the perfect world forever, but instead she looked for herself and saw that the perfect world was incomplete, cruel, and meaningless.
I don’t usually like 3D that much, but the depth added to the visuals was pretty awesome. There weren’t very many instances of , you know, Disney World, stuff jumping into your face 3D. I consider the lack of obnoxious 3D trickery to be a good thing, though. Coraline also had one of the best opening title sequences I’ve ever seen. Even the opening title sequence has meaning to the story once you look back, even though at first it seems just like a very good simple illustration of the idea of reincarnation. The creativity behind this movie is evident in the many trippy moments, where you’re all like “whooooooooa. duuuuuuude.”
Trippiness Rating: 9 Yeah, it’s pretty trippy in places.
Visuals: 9.5 Awesome.
Story: 10 Go see it.
