Coraline is one of the most beautifully animated films ever made. It truly shows that stop motion animation is not dead, and that it should not be overlooked. Coraline is based on the novel by the same name by Neil Gaiman. It is about a little girl named Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning. Coraline and her parents, voiced by John Hodgmen and Teri Hatcher, move to a new house. Coraline finds this new place boring, even though she meets crazy neighbors. She soon finds a small door in her house that leads her into an alternate version of her house. Everything is more magical, wonderful and fun there. There are versions of her parents and neighbors, who she finds more fun and interesting. Even though this new place seems fun on the out side, Coraline is smart and quickly realizes that this world is much darker and twisted than it may appear.

Half way through the film is when it gets a little stranger. It gets very video game like at two different points. First the the second darker would actually brakes apart and reforms again, as if she was inside of a computer, Matrix or Tron style. Right after this she is instructed that she needs to collect three different objects. Which feels very much like any modern platform adventure game. The story progressively gets darker and scarier. Coraline is rated PG and is made to be a children film. But the story gets so dark and twisted that it is easily one of the scariest PG films I have ever seen.

I was lucky enough to watch the film in Stereoscopic 3D. This added an extra element of depth and amazement to the already rich visuals of Coraline. The best part about the film is that there is always something new and interesting to look at. With the two different worlds, the scenery always switches up before it gets stale. The stop motion animation was so fluid and believable, in this area of computer generated images, I was constantly questioning if it had just been created in the computers. I know better to question it because I know that it is fact all classic stop motion. One very interesting aspect of Coraline’s production was they did use the help of computers, but not how Pixar uses those tools. The entire film of Coraline was created by stop motion animation puppets in camera. The interesting thing was how they actually created the puppets. With the help of 3D programs, they created character and objects on the computer. Once completed, they actually used a 3D printer to print out the finished parts. Then they would have the characters and object in the real world to animate in camera, the classical stop motion way.

Coraline was directed by Henry Selick. The true man behind the animation of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, not Tim Burton. This was Henry Selick’s first full stop motion animation feature film without Tim Burton, and in my opinion, hit a home run. I am looking forward to Heny Selick’s next project.