Coraline

[tealin]

I hadn't posted a review because I didn't really have much to say that half the people on my friends list haven't said already: it's good, go see it. It was selling out, here, its opening weekend, so it didn't seem to need my help. But I thought perhaps someone might be curious what I thought of it (after all, you are reading my blog) so I shall say this:

How refreshing! The art direction had a lot of integrity and ingenuity, was imaginative and bold, and weird to see 'blog style' actually in something, more or less unadulterated. The 3D was quite good, I thought, and authentic, probably because they were photographing an actual 3D set as opposed to pushing pixels. The story ... worked ... but I have always had problems with Neil Gaiman and most of my dissatisfaction with this movie stems from the same thing that leaves me dissatisfied with nearly everything else he does.* It's not that I have problems with it so much as it could just ... be ... better. And no, I haven't read the book. The animation was good if a little over-animated at times (argh 'Meet Wybie' sequence argh) and it was amusing to hear Keith David's voice coming from a cat. All in all, though: QUALITY. The end.

*Except Good Omens, for the most part, which ... I mean, TERRY PRATCHETT. Come on.

Comments

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

I feel obliged to inform you that Wybie was not in the book. I haven't seen the movie yet (going to see it this evening though), but I know he was added because Coraline was mostly by herself the entire book talking to herself, which would have been weird onscreen.

I have always had problems with Neil Gaiman and most of my dissatisfaction with this movie stems from the same thing that leaves me dissatisfied with nearly everything else he does.

Hey. You're not allowed to vaguely phrase a sentence to revolve around a subject you never address in the previous or following sentences. That's cheating. What is it you dislike about Gaiman's stuff? You have made me curious with your non-specificness.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all I have come to a conclusion about is summed up in the next sentence: It's not that I have problems with it so much as it could just ... be ... better. I wish I knew enough about story and writing to say why his work feels hollow but I don't; all I can say is that it does. A friend of mine calls it 'good ideas, weak execution,' but I don't know if that quite gets to the core of the matter.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Now that you've mentioned it, I can certainly see where you're coming from. I think it could be the way he writes his characters; just judging by the way you enjoy Terry Pratchett and how you deconstructed Dr. Horrible and the way you like Copenhagen so on, you seem to very much favour stories whose plots are very much driven by solidly-built-up, complex characters.

Whereas Gaiman often uses his characters merely as excuses for there to be neat things happening. They aren't nearly as unique or complex as Sir Pratchett's* incredible characterizations, that's for darn sure. I think the idea is that this makes it seem more like the characters could be just about anybody, and that by extension the characters could be the reader. It certainly does not create memorable characters that leave an indelible imprint in your mind, however, and if you're a person that really likes to latch onto the characters in a book, you might find it difficult to get any sort of protruding ledge of familiarity to wedge your fingers into.

I think he's going for a different sort of thing, Mr Gaiman is. He makes interesting worlds, not interesting characters.

_{* I can't believe we can actually say this now.}

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point, and I think the lack of 'real' characters makes up a large part of the emptiness I feel in his work. Your note about the reader filling the shoes of a 'blank' character reminded me of a passage in the Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Characters regarding Basil, contrasting him with lead characters in Disney movies of the past. I don't have the book on hand but it talked a bit about how the central character in movies like Cinderella, Jungle Book, and The Rescuers was usually left relatively undefined so anyone could identify with them,* then went on to say something along the lines of 'even if we don't identify with Basil, we all want to be him.' That, combined with your point about latching onto characters, explains a lot about my lack of involvement with the movie (and many other works of film and fiction besides) – I find it much easier to identify with a character if I can get inside their head, and if the character is poorly-developed and doesn't display any signs that there is an inside of the head to get into, I can't do it. When I do feel satisfied by a story it's usually when I feel like it's happening to me, and that happens because I'm riding around inside the head of the person it's actually happening to rather than watching events from the outside. Besides, it's fun to pretend to be someone else having an adventure. We all do it as kids, and books and movies give us the chance to continue doing so as adults.

You hit on another thing, too, completely independent of character: Mr Gaiman is gifted when it comes to creating mythologies and generally coming up with neat stuff. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but what bugs me about it is that's as far as he gets; he doesn't seem to take these ideas and worlds and extrapolate consequences and implications that make the story so much richer and more resonant. This is definitely a big part of why I like Discworld and not most other fantasy – it works. Sir Pratchett** takes cliches and stock elements from the type of fantasy I don't like and thinks them through, making it much easier to get a solid footing in his world, even in books where the character development might not be as strong.

To come at it another way: people like Pratchett, Whedon, and Frayn take their gears, levers, nuts and bolts, and put them together to make clocks and steam engines. Gaiman sits in his workshop and devises all sorts of interesting bits (Look at this cogwheel, it's a craaazy shape! And this spring is actually made of straw! Here's a cylinder that's tiny, with a piston that's HUGE!) but doesn't seem to make them work together to accomplish something more. I think that's why Good Omens turned out so well, because he could come up with crazy stuff and Pratchett could make it work.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I really have nothing more to add to this, except to say that with your assistance several neurons have fired in rapid succession in my mind in regards to Things About Writing I Often Wonder About. And for this, I thank you. :)

Also! Some interesting chronology for you. The first seven issues of Gaiman's Sandman comics, are, by his own judgement (and my agreement, not that it matters), awkward and missing something. Issue #8, on the other hand, completely worked, because suddenly Dream had a unique personality and someone fun, his sister Death, to interact with.

Number eight came out after having worked with Pratchett for a few years on Good Omens. Coincidence? Probably not. :)

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Hmmm! Yet another reason to love Sir P, Bringer of Good Things.

A little bit more on Pratchett characterization (you've got me going now; I'm going to be thinking about this all day ... :). It really wasn't until the post-The Truth sort of era in Discworld that I got to appreciate his characterizations. Up until that point it felt like he had a sort of repertory of characters that he'd cast in whatever roles necessary to tell the story he wanted to tell: the strong sensible (often headstrong) female, the bewildered young man struggling to cope with what was going on around him, the supporting cast who could be set loose to have Pythonesque conversations. Susan isn't that much different from Granny Weatherwax in personality, or Mort from Brutha or Teppic or Lobsang. But the world still worked, and the stories did too, and whatever he was satirizing or whatever point he was trying to make still came through, and they were still fun to read. That said, the fact that the Death and Watch books tend to be the most popular of this era is evidence that their relatively unique central characters stand out and grab the audience.

His more recent books still have many of the same sorts of characters (Moist is the Bewildered Man, and Polly is both Strong Woman and Bewildered Man in a wonderfully appropriate play on gender roles) but they're much more fully-realized and independent of each other, I think.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, his earlier things are very different reads from his his later and most recent ones. They sound very amateurish at times - you can really tell he was new at this whole "novel-writing" thing. It seems to me like he didn't really think he'd make it big or anything, so he threw together all his ideas about fantasy in an anti-fantasy manner in the first few books and went "THERE. Now they all know. I can die content."

After he got that out of his system, he could finally get comfortable in his authorial shoes and write the things he wanted to, as opposed to the things he thought he ought to inform everyone about.

When you REALLY think about characters in general though, they are all, more or less, reluctant heroes. How they act reluctant, why they are, what will make them not, what they are not reluctant about, what they really want to be doing instead of this, whether they show that they are or put on some sort of facade pretending they aren't. All of these subtle little nuances are what make the 'hero' of a certain story (whether they are heroes in any other sense of the word or no) different from all the others. Even well-established, heroic heroes like Iron Man or Spiderman or Captain America are reluctant about certain aspects of what they do, or sometimes wish they didn't have the ability to help people so that they didn't feel like they have to.

Can you tell I like picking about stories and their elements? I think about this sort of thing all the time, and characterization is one of the topics I find myself constantly returning to. I mean, one would think that, with all of the stories told and all of the characters in them, we would have covered all the bases by now, yes? But no! Even if two heroes of two different stories are strikingly similar personality-wise, they will be in unique situations with unique barriers, and will even possibly be able to tackle the exact same choice with entirely different decisions simply based on their experiences.

Stories are glorious things!

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Oh! And you should try some of his short stories. I find that I personally feel less obligated to attach to characters in short stories, as they aren't there long anyway. You might be able to get into some of those more. Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors are two of his collections.

But I must warn you about his poetry. It's sort of jarringly meter-less and free verse, with only a few notable exceptions. It's... well, it isn't usually very good. I warn you because he puts them in his short story collections, haha. Well. He tries. XD

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Hmm, good suggestion...

Sounds like his poems encapsulate what I don't like about his novels, in miniature. :)

[fani.livejournal.com]

Fragile Things is IMHO better than Smoke and Mirrors. The Smoke and Mirrors feels a lot like, "Oooh! Lookit me! I can WRITE, AHAHAHA I R GENIUZZ" The short story I liked best in Fragile Things is about the old lady who cooks ink cap mushrooms and the parody of the gothic story, can't miss it, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGEST title in the collection.

Also, Coraline the actual novel is imho the best he's got so far. I remember freshman year, reading Coraline in my room and my roomate was absent that day... scariest experience I've had until I wayched the Blink episode in Dr. Who.

[maggielisette.livejournal.com]

Yeah, some of Gaiman's stuff just doesn't...satisfy. That said, the book Coraline was pretty good (and delightfully creepy).

Oh and OMG Good Omens for the win! :D

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

I am relieved to know that I'm not the only one who found it horribly over-animated. Perhaps "horribly" is too strong a word... though it is bad, especially in the first part of the movie.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

The over-animation would have been slightly less annoying if only it didn't clash with the line reading. Listen to your dialogue track, people! Does it sound like she should stomp her foot on 'Jones'? No! Don't do it!

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely. Perhaps they were animating to a temp track.

Didn't help that the voice acting was pretty flat, too. Needed more contrast.

[fani.livejournal.com]

Didn't help that the voice acting was pretty flat, too. Needed more contrast.

Yes, for sure. They all have the same voice timbre

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I entertained that notion as well, but ... I dunno, it didn't even seem to fit the words they were saying. It reminded me a lot of Nocturna which, I don't know if they animated to the English track and few of them understood it or what (the lipsynch usually worked so maybe that's what it was), but it was like they tried to compensate for lack of character development by just piling more into the animation. Gorgeous animation, it just didn't work.

The voice acting was flat a lot, you're right* ... on the other end of the spectrum, I thought for sure Wybie was voiced by someone who's made an adult career out of being The Wacky Kid on cartoons, but he wasn't. Not that substandard voice acting is a death-knell for an animated performance; Mark Henn got some amazing stuff out of Mulan and by her voice track she ought to have been a zombie. I guess we can't all be Mark Henn though.

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I guess it's much more difficult when doing stop-motion. (Though Aardman doesn't seem to have any trouble with it.)

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

ALSO ALSO, I can't count the number of times that - while watching the film - I wished that it would have been animated traditionally (uh, 2D, that is).

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I know they often do a couple of 'rehearsal' passes before they shoot it for real, and at any rate they should have been thumnailing and planning the scene before they jumped right in with the models. Surely at some point they'd have to show someone before it got into the final cut of the film (preferably before using anything expensive, like film or time), and that someone should have said 'your performance is cracked out, yo.'

[beckychan.livejournal.com]

I was enthralled with the dark gothic fairy tale aspect of it. There were actually some fairy tale elements that were... used but not used. The fairy ring and the fact that she was eating so much in the other world really should have been more significant.

It was beautiful, though, and I was pleased to see it, and intend to get the soundtrack.

[bonnieslasher.livejournal.com]

I love the Pratchett vs Gaiman discussion that this review spawned. My head hurts from nodding in agreement.


Have to see Coraline - argh! Perhaps I will drag someone with me to see it this week.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Hah, I didn't mean for it to be so adversarial between the two, but dangit, Pratchett is just SO GOOD. And thanks to Aspectabund I now have something to tell people when they say 'Oh you like Pratchett, you'd love Gaiman!' which happens A LOT. :)

[bonnieslasher.livejournal.com]

Maybe 'vs' wasn't the right way to put it, but. I respect Gaiman as a good writer, just not a writer I'm excited about. And I'm sort of used to people cornering me if I say I'm not excited about Gaiman :P and Pratchettissogood!

Curious though, any thoughts on Margrat Garlik? It's been a while since I've read the witch books, but she stood out as a contrast to his usual hard/strong lead women. Don't know if she ever counted as a lead woman, but still. The bit about her and Verence and the fake mustaches always tickles me. I'm in general agreement with your sum up of Pratchett's male and female characters, especially with Polly.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Lolol, there is a detectable hint of GLEE in your voice at finally discovering the problem, Ms Twirlynoodle. XD Glad to be of service, haha!

[bonnieslasher.livejournal.com]

I have your icon in poster form. It took me a while to realize that, as yours is in color :P

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Excuse me while I sit here on the other side of the interwebs, feeling intensely envious. >:|

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Since seeing Coraline I've had this conversation with three different people at three different times and each time I'm just kind of left there gesturing at the air so yes, glee is about right. :) Thank you!

[hyel.livejournal.com]

I feel the way you do about Neil Gaiman but only when it comes to his novels. I think it's only because they're, well, not his short stories. Some of his short stories are such whammos of goodness it's hard to be satisfied with less awesome from the same man. The comics, also good. (Not all of them. I'm looking at you, Dream Hunters. You too, Signal to Noise.)

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

I guess I can't really comment, since I haven't seen the movie yet (although I saw the promo, and it looked what I call "creepy-cool"), and I haven't read anything by Neil Gaiman. Although, I do own two of his books. Thing is, I own a huge pile of books that I haven't had the time to read yet, a few of which are Pratchett books.

Gaiman has cool ideas, if the blurbs on the backs of his books are anything to judge by--at any rate, they interested me enough to buy one or two of them.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Ahahaa, I think I may have found more reason for the over-animated sequences: http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/5720/the-technology-behind-coraline.html

"HOLY COW WE HAVE SO MANY FACES LET US USE THEM ALL LOLOLOL YAY!"

Sounds like a really cool piece of tech, though.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

My problem wasn't so much with the faces ... They just moved too much, in general, and often the body movements didn't support the line they were saying or even clashed with it. The faces were nice. Speaking as someone who's done battle with CG, the more facial opportunities you have the better. :)