Okay so here's the deal. I have written about this three times now. This will be the third time. The first one I feel like I really nailed it, and then it disappeared. I counted my losses and worked on the second one. Not as good but I still felt it was worth publishing so I published it. Then it vanished. So despite how much I love this movie, I'm going to make this one fairly brief.
I've been watching a lot of movies lately that I haven't seen since childhood, and this definitely fits in that category. I remember liking it as a kid, and I really enjoy it as an adult. Wikipedia describes this movie as a dark fantasy horror stop animation movie. Notice how it never says children's movie.
The first half of Coraline I would consider a children's movie. The first half of the movie is devoted almost entirely just showing how amazing this other world Coraline stumbles upon is. They essentially make it out to be every kid's Paradise. Then in the second half of the movie, they take all the amazing characters and settings and turn them dark and evil.
If I was a kid and somehow stumbled upon Coraline, I imagine the second half would leave me scared for quite a while. The whole finding children's eyes thing probably would be too much for most kids to handle. And that's not even talking about the spider like mother creature that tries to eat Coraline.
In summary, Coraline is a very dark kids movie full of gorgeous stop motion animation, a truly scary villain, and lots of Tim Burton vibes.
10/10
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