Coraline My G.O.A.T

Growing up, Coraline was my favorite movie. The art, the plot, and Coraline herself all make for a story that has become the foundation of my favorite entertainment and art. The story follows a young girl, Coraline, who has recently moved to a new home that she hates. She feels neglected by her parents, has lost connection with her hometown friends, and this weirdo across the hill keeps bugging her (literally!). She finds a passageway in her home that leads…to her home?! But this place is different; it’s full of saturated colors and of parents and neighbors who love her and aren’t so annoying and weird. But of course, there’s a major catch…

beautiful worldbuilding

Coraline is a stop-motion film that took over a year and a half to film, with a pre-production of around 2 years. In that time, the craftsmanship that was achieved is incredible and each time I rewatch it, I remain just as inspired and in awe as the first time. 

The world in which Coraline moves to initially, though dark, dreary, and literally grey, is beautiful in its storytelling abilities. Through its bleak and boring exterior, it provides the perfect backdrop to understanding part of why Coraline is so unhappy in her new home. So, when we are transported along with our heroine to “the other world”, “the other mother and father”, and all the other “others”, we’re just as on edge as Coraline. 

Its bright colors and wonderful homemaking provide her and the audience with a sense of excitement but also unease, everything seeming a bit too unnaturally colorful, a bit too perfect. 

But, being a 12-year-old girl, she ultimately ends up visiting this other world multiple times before listening to her initial gut feeling of unease. And I can’t even blame the girl. The real world is dreadful! This other world is beautiful and makes her feel special in its obsession with her happiness and wants. There’s a huge garden made to be her face, neighbors creating circus and theater shows in her honor, and “mango-mango milkshakes” on a whim.

 This film wonderfully builds the grey world that pushes her into this bright, exciting, mystical-but-unsafe one.

fantastic plot

This movie’s plot is unmatched. From the fantastic mind of Neil Gaiman, it takes a wonderful children’s book with dark themes and interesting characters and transforms it into a visual masterpiece, maintaining much of the original book’s plot, opting to remove only a few aspects that didn’t dramatically affect the story, and adding in some additional plotpoints and characters (such as Wybie) so Coraline could have someone her age to bounce dialogue off of. 

Beyond mostly sticking to the original story, the plot is interesting because it tackles so many dark and unfortunate themes. There are themes of kidnapping, child death, torture, neglect, emotional neglect, and loneliness; all things that many children experience but aren’t necessarily obvious in other children’s media. I think these themes being very obviously tackled in the plot of this film is really cool and useful to the children that understand these ideas but maybe cannot deal with them on their own. To see these very real, though sometimes taboo, themes on the screen could certainly help a child cope with them in their own lives.

relatable main character

When people dog on my G.O.A.T Coraline, they often say that she is bratty or entitled. I think those people should watch the movie again. My girl is 12 years old, in a home where her parents are clearly very involved in their work. She has moved away from her few friends to a place without many other children, where it’s dark every day, and she looks to her parents for help in coping with this. They don’t! Instead, her dad tells her to go count all the windows and doors in the house and to let him work. 

She’s not always bratty; she just wants to be listened to. By anybody! No one can get her name right, no one helps her when her parents disappear, and no one pays her any mind. I think many children can relate to this feeling of being the odd one out, moving away from your friends, starting at a new school, being called “bossy,” and being ignored. Especially as a young girl.

Any of these points in isolation would reserve Coraline a top-5 spot on my movies/media/books list, but everything combined makes for a captivating story, with the most beautiful set, and an incredibly relatable and lovable main character, placing Coraline at the tip-top of my favorite movies of all time. 

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• coraline
• film