On the screen: Coraline
By Zoey Kennedy
Coraline is a movie that was made in 2009 based on the book by Neil Gaiman (and it is one of my favorite movies!). The story follows a young girl named Coraline jones who has just moved to a new place known as the pink palace. While adventuring around the pink palace she meets a young boy named Wybie lovat who gives her a doll that looks almost identical to her.
One day Coraline decides to explore her house and finds a little door in the wall but all that is behind it is bricks and she leaves it alone. One night while she’s trying to go to bed, she sees a mouse in her room and it guides her back to the little door and when she opens it, she sees a tunnel that leads to another world. In that world lives duplicates of all the people back in her world. The only difference is that they all have button eyes.
Coraline goes exploring around the other world and has interactions with characters such as the other mother (Also known as the Beldam), The other father, The black cat, Mr. Bobinski, Mrs. spink and forcible, and the other Wybie. The other mother tells Coraline she could stay with them forever if she did one thing. Sew buttons over her eyes. Coraline declines and the other mother gets furious.
The other mother kidnaps Coralines’ real parents and puts them in a snow globe and throws Coraline into a room behind a mirror where she meets three ghost children whose souls were taken by the beldam. Coraline makes a deal with the beldam saying if she can find the three ghosts children’s souls that she would let her and her parents go and the beldam agrees. Coraline goes looking around the whole pink palace and one by one she finds the ghost children’s souls.
The beldam is furious that Coraline succeeded and refused to let her go. Coraline then grabs the snow globe and the ghost’s children’s souls quickly and runs right past the beldam and into the little door back to her world. The beldam fights to get Coraline back, but she’s too late. Coraline gets to the other side and just like that her parents were back, but it’s like they never knew that they were gone. That night Coraline put the three ghost children’s souls under her pillow and then the ghost children were finally set free from the beldam, and everything went back to normal, but Coraline would never dare to go through the door again. When the film was released, it was met with great praise from critics and grossed $126 million on its initial release and raised that number to $188 million on re-releases, making it the third- highest- grossing stop motion film of all time. Critics highlighted the fact that the film is a children’s dark fantasy that doesn’t shy away from eeriness and suspenseful topics.
