Thy Button-sewn Eyes.

I’ve been awaiting the new Henry Selick with stretched toes and bitten fingernails. In my opinion, Selick’s peak was in 1993 when he coupled up with Burton’s story to create the immortal “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. Selick’s career so far has been brief and non-vibrant ever since; I personally believe the reasons can be summed up in Selick constantly failing to find a grotesque hard-core dark content that he can fine-tune into a more pleasant film. I mean, working with Burton in the early nineties will definitely leave you for a while starving for an equally mind-blasting content.

Nobody can ever tell if Selick gave up or had a hard time with mediocrity, but then came Neil Gaiman with his 2002 9-pages novella “Coraline”. Frequently compared to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and described to have been found scarier by adults more than children, “Coraline” was the awaited content for Selick to convert into his new 2009 stop-motion film. He did a great job, making a festive out of the simple illustrations one can find in a 9-pages comic strip using the concept of stop-motion. The same one used all over by the Burton-infused “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Vincent”; defined by Wikipedia as an “animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own”.



My initial reaction after watching the movie was not all that impressed; especially that it had neither a Danny Elfman soundtrack nor any rhyming literature-orgasmic Tim Burton conversations. However, it grew on me, for the rest of the day; I couldn’t get the story out of my mind. I mean, this is sheer genius. Coraline, the unsatisfied ignored-from-her-parents-blue-haired kid gets to find a secret door where she gets inside to get to her “other family” who get her everything she wants and lacks in her “real life” including waves of good food, a better garden, better neighbours, pure attention from everyone’s side… correct pronunciation of her name. However, since there is no such thing as a free lunch, her other mother tells her that she can stay there forever if she wants to, on the one condition of “sewing buttons in her eyes” for her to be just like them. If I read this novella when I was a child, I would have probably been blind by now for I would have definitely tried to sew buttons into my eyes… I mean what sort of grotesque drug was Gaiman on. It had been a long time since someone gave me a simple metaphor I can dwell and day dream about. Coraline left me with a mission of acquiring the novella in my possession – even though this whole possession of things stuff was never really my thing – in addition to his Sandman comic series especially when he gets to introduce Death as the older sister, tag lined “How would you feel if Death was your older sister?” but that’s another story…