Be careful what you wish for

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, August 30th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming up on The World and Everything in It… arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino evaluates a not-so new movie.

COLLIN GARBARINO: Movie theaters usually experience a late summer slump in August. Studios don’t release their best movies during these weekends that parents are frantically trying to get their kids ready to go back to school. This lull turned out to be the perfect time to rerelease Coraline, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary.

CORALINE: It’s Coraline.

WYBIE: Caroline what?

CORALINE: Coraline! Coraline Jones!

Henry Selick is the writer and director of this stop-motion masterpiece that adapts Neil Gaiman’s 2002 children’s novel of the same name. Selick is the same guy who directed Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, so you can expect the movie is going to be a little spooky.

The movie begins with Coraline Jones and her parents moving into a rickety 100-year-old house. Coraline is a bright kid, but she’s feeling a little neglected by her work-from-home parents who are too absorbed in their jobs to pay her much attention.

MOM: Coraline, I don’t have time for you right now. And you still have unpacking to do. Lots of unpacking.

While exploring the old house, Coraline finds a little door that opens onto a brick wall. Except sometimes it doesn’t open onto a brick wall. Sometimes, late at night, the door opens onto a tunnel that leads to another world.

A scene from Coraline 2024 Fathom Events

After crawling through the tunnel, Coraline finds herself in a house that looks a lot like hers, only cheerier. She also finds an Other Mother who’s just like her own mother back in the real world, except she’s more fun. And strangely, she has black buttons for eyes. To Coraline, this other world feels like the kind of place where all her dreams will come true. But we can tell from the start that something’s not quite right. After all, who has buttons for eyes? This isn’t really a dream. It’s a nightmare.

OTHER MOTHER: There now. It’s your decision, darling. We only want what’s best for you.

Coraline is technically a children’s movie, but I wouldn’t advise watching it with very young children or children who are easily frightened. The spookiness sometimes becomes a little scary. It definitely pushes the boundaries of its PG rating. There’s also a rather grotesque scene in which a scantily clad overweight old woman parodies Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus.

Coraline is a beautiful movie. The girl’s real world is worn and dull, but it has so much texture. The Other Mother’s world is sparkly and shiny, with everything seemingly made brand new. The animation is so smooth, you’ll be amazed the movie was created using stop-motion photography. The filmmakers worked for more than a year and a half, producing only about 90 seconds each week. The Coraline puppet alone had more than 200,000 different facial expressions. Each scene was shot with two different cameras, so if you see it in theaters, you’ll get a true stereoscopic experience.

The film contains a lesson about contentment. Its tagline is: “Be careful what you wish for.” Little Coraline desires a life that’s better than the one she has, but when she gets it, she realizes the consequences of her folly. If the desires of a man’s heart tend toward evil, we should be wary of getting just what we want.

THE CAT: And what do you think you’re doing?

CORALINE: Well, I’m getting out of here. That’s what I’m doing.

The story of Coraline is a sort of a reverse Chronicles of Narnia. Coraline finds a door that leads to a magical realm, but instead of leading to a better country, she finds out that the better country was the one she left behind.

Neil Gaiman, who wrote the original novel, isn’t a Christian, but he was heavily influenced by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And while the movie is a masterpiece of animation, I still think the book is much better.

The novel is quieter, more subtle. Coraline’s not as sassy. Her real parents aren’t as cranky. It’s an introspective story about a girl who’s much more self-aware than the Coraline of the movie. I highly recommend it.

Over the last decade, Coraline seems to have grown into an allegory that it was never meant to be. I honestly can’t think of a better analogy for our current algorithm-driven existence that promises to give us just what we want—our entire lives filtered through a digital experience that prioritizes capturing our attention over exposing us to reality. This story asks whether it would actually be a good thing to be the center of the universe. What if you could have a whole world tailor-made just for you? The only catch? None of it is real and it will only cost you your soul.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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