Coraline – Cunning authoritarianism avoided through self-awareness

Adapted from a Neil Gaiman book, the story of Coraline contains elements of gothic, horror and suspense, nothing like the common fairytales and other children's movies the young public is used to. This 3-D stop-motion animated movie features lots of intense action, hair-raising scenes and lots of adrenaline rushes. It offers a good range of the uncanny, including blinding, premature burial, ghosts and the terrible mother. Coraline is a dark and grim fairytale whose fantasy world is filled with enchantments, strange creatures, magical toys and talking animals. Its tense, awkward feeling persists throughout most of the movie. The most frightening character of the story, which causes most of the eeriness, is certainly that of the Other Mother. Her role of a cruel and oppressive tyrant hidden behind sweet words and promises is one of the most striking of the grotesque oddities on which the story relies.

One of the most important and most quickly introduced symbols in the film is that of the doll. The discovery of a button-eyed doll begins the adventures. We see this dolly at first before the title, autopsied in front of us by mechanical fingers made of sewing needles. Traditionally dolls are comfort toys; they offer a feeling of security to children. However, this strange picture of a dolly being turned inside out warns us that something wrong is about to take place in a world of a child, that this toy’s purpose is much more sinister than we expect. When Coraline, the bright-blue-haired girl, discovers a magical port which takes her to the Other World, a better reality she has always dreamed of, we are shown for the first time how a whole world serves as a means for a completely menacing end. At the end of a glowing blue tunnel Coraline’s Other Parents are waiting for her. They're sweet and attentive, nothing like her boring and uninterested real parents. They load Coraline's plate with cakes, flatter her and charm her, celebrating her existence by offering her everything she desires. These strange beings prove to be warmer and more attentive than Coraline’s real parents, particularly the Other Mother , who does everything she can to impress Coraline – she is seemingly a perfect mom, she is a perfect cook and has a perfect answer to every question. But as we become more acquainted with Coraline’s new world, we start to understand, just like Caroline does, that this sweetness has a price.

This Other Mother and Other Father have shiny black buttons for eyes which will become a key symbol of steeling one’s freedom and asserting authority. The Other Parents offer Coraline a chance to stay in the Other World forever, if Coraline will allow buttons to be sewn into her eyes, in other words, if she allows her soul to be taken and be destroyed. Since this is the very beginning of the story, we are immediately thrown into the heart of events. The black button eyes let us know that we're in the other world, highlighting how disturbing and imposing it is. They are the symbol of turning innocent things into threatening things. The Other Mother is binding her victims to herself in order to gain authority over them. Natural eyes represent insight and the ability to think for oneself. Therefore, by removing Coraline's eyes, the Other Parents would be removing her freedom. The Other Mother wants Coraline to see things only from her distorted perspective, not having her own thoughts, her own life. For Coraline's Other Parents these buttons essentially act like masks. Coraline cannot tell if her Other Mother and her Other Father are watching her and she cannot get any clues through their eyes as to what they are thinking. These eyes hide the humanness of the people wearing them and distort every real and healthy emotion that should exist among people. That is why Coraline's Other Mother could never really be loved by the children she kidnaps. Her only goal is to possess, not care. This Other Mother’s

tyranny is seen in her relationship with the Other Father as well. The Father acts like the Other Mother’s slave, showing a scared and traumatized attitude. He seems to retain some aspects of Coraline’s real father by constantly stating he does not wish to hurt her but that he is being forced by the Other Mother into horrible wrongdoings. He constantly apologizes for attacking her and blames the Other Mother for his lapse of control. Once again, there is a clear line drawn between one’s dictatorship and the submissiveness of others. This dreadful character of the Other Mother, “the beldam”, as she is referred to several times (a Middle English word meaning "grandmother," "ugly old woman," or "hag") as well as her aggressiveness and anger are very vividly presented when she takes the form of a monstrous spider-like witch with a bony face and hands fashioned from sewing machines, thus revealing her true self.

At this point of the story, Coraline has already realised that she must fight this horrific nightmare. She becomes very perceptive, which she was not at the start, she is more mature and aware of herself and others. She still is very emotional but not so fragile. We witness how her inner self develops from a whining little girl to a hero who at the end of the day saves not only herself but the others she cares about as well. However, she would not have done it alone – she had guides that led her safely through her journey. Throughout the film, only one character is clever enough to escape the Other Mother's snares: the black cat. The cat is the only character which gives her most obvious clues about the incorrectness of the Other World. He will not accept the witch's lies, thus remaining in complete control of his own affairs, even in Other Mother’s world. Unlike many of the characters in the novel, he does not have an "Other World" counterpart, stating that unlike other creatures in the world, cats can "keep themselves together". This is precisely what the cat does – he keeps Coraline on the right track, always on the ground, guiding her with reason. This is where the world of fantasy and the world of reason collide, the point where Coraline begins growing up and accepting responsibilities. At the beginning of the movie Coraline insults the cat, along with Wybie – the landlady’s grandson who is a real annoyance to Coraline, but she grows to like both of them when they prove themselves as her allies. Another very important role of the black cat is that he makes Coraline rethink how she has been behaving.

The fact that Coraline’s adventure in the Other World starts as a dream and that her real parents have no memory of what had been happening to them, depicts Coraline inner struggle and her deep unconscious desire to free herself from authority. At the beginning she feels limited by her real parents and aggravated for not being taken seriously. She strongly fights against their insensitivity but realizes soon enough a worse kind of tyranny can exist – oppressive behaviours which strangle not only one’s emotions but one’s life and soul as well. Coraline’s typical childish behaviour – her capriciousness, pride and strong temperament – very soon transform into cleverness. Her initial judgmental thinking that her parents’ constant work makes them neglect the deep spiritual communication between them and her soon turns into mature understanding of life. She recovers herself and learns to rely on herself. This recognition of hers becomes most prominent when her parents disappear, thus realizing what is the most important to her – her family.

In order to save her parents, Coraline challenges, upon cat’s advice, the Other Mother to a game, since she never turns down a good game. If she can find her parents and the eyes of the ghost children, everyone goes free; if she loses, she will stay in the Other World forever and have the buttons sewn into her eyes. However, she finds later on that the Other Mother has no plans of letting her go, even if she wins the game. As another part of her growth, Coraline must face and learn to accept all the hypocrisy, the ugliness and unfairness that await her in life. She

also learns to fight it, not submit to it. She learns to face her own choices, to face the evil of the world. As in the Grimm Brothers stories, there is something that does not agree with our feelings of pure good simply defeating evil. It rather insists that cleverness and wisdom are often needed to save our skins.

Coraline is genuinely strange, creepy and arresting. The unconventional imagery, the grotesquery, the magical, the colourful world that's also dark and disturbing, the violence and scary scenes place this film on a thin line between beautiful children’s stories and odd horror ones. Coraline’s symbolism seems both artful and troubling. In addition, all the elements of horror, macabre, the uncanny and fantastical, all the gasps of awe and disturbance made by the astounded audience add a dimension to the story that takes it beyond a simple adventure fairytale.