Laika/Focus Features, 2009, 100 minutes
To view the trailer, go here.
As bad as things seem at any given moment, they could always be worse, much much worse. And that greener grass on the other side of the fence could very well be an illusion. Those are lessons they don't really teach kids in any classroom; you're expected to learn them in the school of hard knocks, also known as life. This masterpiece of stop-motion animation provides a real public service in making those hard lessons palatable and fun to impressionable minds both young and old.
The title character, Coraline Jones, is a bored little girl who gets a rare opportunity to appreciate just how good she has it - by getting a hair-raising glimpse of how bad things might be.
When Coraline moves with her parents into a new home at the Pink Palace Apartments, she soon grows bored trying to get her busy work-at-home folks' attention, as they're too preoccupied with writing and editing a garden catalog. Coraline promptly discovers a secret doorway to a parallel universe. There, her "other" mother and father have eyes only for her: fixing her favorite foods, composing songs for her at the piano, planting a magic garden in her image, and just generally doting on her and spoiling her to death. Literally. Pretty soon, Coraline learns there's just one catch to this "perfect" life: her "other" mother wants to remove her eyes and replace them with buttons.
Coraline's main ally in escaping this daydream-turned-nightmare is a black cat, but dogs make memorable appearances too- specifically, a trio of Scottish terriers belonging to two elderly neighbors, Ms. Spink and Forcible, a couple of ancient chorus girls voiced by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. In the parallel universe, there's a scene that takes place in a theater resembling Carnegie Hall (or perhaps La Scala) where the audience is entirely composed of...Scottish terriers.
In one scene, we see shelf after shelf of late Scotties who've passed on, their bodies stuffed in a taxidermy shrine in the old ladies' home. This is not a scary scene: on the contrary, it's a quite respectful depiction of how some dog lovers cope with the inevitable, clinging to the remains of beloved, deceased dogs. This kind of matter-of-fact treatment of life's big questions makes Coraline a movie milestone that respects dogs as well as kids.
| Presence of dogs: |  |
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