Coraline review requested. Anybody see Coraline yet?
My girlfriend and I want to see the move.
We want somebody that has seen the movie to let us know if we should bother. We trust you guys.
Decent date movie. Interesting characters/premise/puppetry. Ending has that arbitrary feeling that so many fairy tale-esque tales do.
(Parents note, it is a PG-13 movie for a reason.)
Worth the price of admission and popcorn.
Pretty sure its PG…
There are a couple of unusually large breast scene which I found amusing. However it is quite dark and scary but not graphically. My 10 year old and her friend loved it. I didn’t really want to go but I really enjoyed it.
Argh. Yeah, it’s PG. I claim advanced age as a defense. Point is, don’t take the five-year-olds. Nine and up should be fine.
But… Where’s Wally? 
Review for people who have read the book: It’s fairly similar except in Oregon and not England, a foil character in the form of Wybie has been added (to good effect, I thought, it lessened the impact of Coraline going through this more or less alone but added a good emotional impact), some of the events have been reshuffled, and the ending is slightly different.
Review for people who have not read the book: Whimsical, beautiful, fantastic. A ten year old girl is the main character, but it’s not necessarily a kid’s movie. (In fact, if I had seen this when I was about eight or nine I might have had nightmares. The opening reminds me of a Tool music video.) It’s got that sense of surrealism and fantasy that you’d expect in something based around a kid–think Labyrinth, maybe, for the parts where she’s in the other world.
I didn’t think that the effects were distracting to the story, since I went in looking for effects (as a kid, I wanted to be a Muppeteer or a special effects person and that interest has never really gone away) and kept getting distracted by the story I do think that it adds to that surrealism in a way that traditional animation or CG animation doesn’t, since there’s something kind of inherently creepy about stop-motion to me. Something about the way that some sections seem to stutter, maybe. In any case, it’s done beautifully.
The story itself is pretty simple: lonely kid goes to a world where everything seems better, things aren’t as they appear on the surface, kid has to set things right.
Personally, I loved the book and was thrilled to see it visually realized like this, and my husband got a kick out of it despite me basically dragging him to it. It’s kind of creepy, kind of lighthearted, and a lot of fun.