Movie Review- Coraline

We took the kids to see Coraline yesterday. It's a kids movie, filmed with stop-motion animation and presented in a new kind of 3-D. The 3-D doesn't try to make the objects float out into the theater as it used to. This seems to give depth to the screen, extending the distance between the characters at the front of the screen and the depth of the background. It was pretty cool.

I liked it. My wife liked it. My older son (age 7) liked it.

"That movie was just terrible," according to my younger son (age 4).

I don't think he liked wearing the 3-D glasses, for starters. I can't totally blame him. They aren't the cardboard kind like they used to make, but at least with those kind you looked cool, as long as you didn't wear them outside of the theater.

These days they have these plastic glasses with big over-sized grandma frames that make you look like a dork, even in the darkened movie theater.

But I don't think it was a style issue that my little one objected to. This is a kid who will wear a green Power Ranger costume to the supermarket. He's not all that self-conscious (yet).

I guess he thought there were a couple of spooky parts. SPOILER ALERT! Like when the "Other Mother" turns into a tall stringy witch and locks Coraline in the dank dungeon bedroom where there are three ghosts of kids that died in there, and Coraline has to find their missing eyes to free their souls. Or the part when the Other Mother wants to sew buttons onto Coraline's eyes with a needle so sharp you will hardly feel it, because everyone in that world has them. Or the part toward the end where the Other Mother's arms and legs turn into sharp metal spider legs and she traps Coraline in her web.

So for most of the movie, the little one sat there without his glasses on, starting at the blurry screen, just so he could complain about his headache once we got in the car.

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