Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Coraline ::
by William the Bloody
Coraline Jones is a young girl who just moved from Michigan to Oregon with her two parents. They now reside in an old Victorian house which has been subdivided into renting flats and dubbed "The Pink Princess." To Coraline, this is lame. It's a big, drafty, peeling, old place far away from her friends. It doesn't help that the people in the other apartments are crazy old people and the land lady's grandson who keeps hanging around just never shuts up. Her parents are writers who work from home but never let her play outside in the rain or work on her garden when its muddy out. Yep, lame, lame, lame. In an effort to keep herself entertained, she starts wandering around the house with a notepad listing things: how many windows and light switches there are and just when she thinks she's counted all the doors, she finds another one. Only, this door is small and has been wallpapered over. Also, it is locked. She begs her mother to allow her to open it, and she relents, only to discover a brick wall behind it and her mother surmises that it must have gotten bricked up when the converted the house to apartments. That night Coraline wakes up to find a cute jumping mouse in her doorway, which she chases downstairs and to the small door, and she opens it to find not a brick wall, but a long mysterious portal. Curious, Coraline crawls through this tunnel-like place and comes out the other end to find... the living room she just left on the other side.... only, it isn't. She hears someone else in the house, and intrigued follows the voice into the kitchen to find her mother making dinner... only it isn't her mother. It looks like her mother. It sounds like her mother. Only, this mother has big, black buttons for eyes. This woman says she is Coraline's Other Mother (everyone has one, an Other Mother) and that she would like nothing more than to love Coraline for ever and ever. The Other Mother makes a very tempting offer, as this other house is full of fantastic wonders: magical dragonflies that call her name, a glowing and beautiful garden, neighbours that aren't weird old people but incredible performers whose only desire is to entertain Coraline, and Other Mother always cooks Coraline's favourite dinners and gives her extravagant gifts. Coraline could have this amazing world all the time and never go back to her real parents if she really wanted to. If she were willing to make one little sacrifice...
The Good: This stop-motion animated feature is brought to you by author Neil Gaiman and the director and production house that made The Nightmare Before Christmas. If that one sentence doesn't tell you right off the bat that this is something pretty darn keen, then I don't know what would. The stop motion in this thing was fantastic. All of these long, fluid movements which never once came across as choppy or unnatural. The characters had some cool little personality traits such as Other Mother drumming her fingers and the land lady's grandson tilting his head. The voices were exceptionally well done, with Dakota Fanning in the title role, Teri Hatcher as the Other Mother/Coraline's real mother, John Hodgeman (the PC guy in the Mac vs PC ads) as Coraline's father/Other Father, Keith David as The Cat, and a swell French & Saunders reunion as Miss Forcible and Miss Spink respectively, who are the two old ladies who live in the basement apartment. They all were simply fantastic and really tied the whole film together with great vocal performances. One of the main differences from the book is the addition of the land lady's grandson character, but this didn't really bother me or take away from the overall story. He was kind of necessary to give us some background exposition on the house and the creepiness within and also acted as someone for Coraline to interact with, otherwise it would have been a girl having mostly one sided conversations with a cat for an hour. The music was really neat and featured contributions by They Might Be Giants, which is always a treat.
The Bad: One thing I felt was missing was the underlying sense of dread I felt the Other Mother always projected in the book. In addition to her button eyes, she had long, long fingernails and subtlely sharp teeth. I always got the feeling from reading the story that these characteristics were there, but only slightly so that you might think you were imagining it, like something you may or may not have seen out of the corner of your eye. The movie has Other Mother as pretty much normal looking except for the button eyes and the perpetually cheerful attitude, which in of itself can come across as a little eerie, but to me it just felt like the overall creepiness of her was toned down. Many of the other scary parts from the book were altered for the screen, like the final show down at the well was drastically edited down and the whole thing with the collapse of the Other Father was changed pretty much completely, probably because it would have been way too graphically disturbing to children. The bawdy burlesque show performances by the Other Spink and Forcible made me more than a little uncomfortable in a children's movie, but this also made them even more hilarious on some level.
Overall, I thought this film was a cute, fun, fantastic little treat. It has some really superb animation and super keen visuals and terrific voice acting really brought the characters home. If you're a fan of the book, this is a must see (the changes that were made do not take away and a great deal else is right on the money), and even if you're not you very well may find something about this little charmer of a film to enjoy.
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