enchanted ground

[freckles_and_doubt]

There's still a significant portion of my psyche which seems to operate at about age 8, particularly when confronted with anything in the "oooh" category - the magical, the unreal, the not quite possible. Magicians elicit this response, as do fireworks and parkour, and now, apparently, so does 3D animation. I've never seen a 3D film before (bad film critic! no biscuit), and Coraline on Friday night was a truly amazing experience productive of a great deal of "oooh"ing, wriggling ecstatically in my seat and a sort of suspended wonder.


This was a really good adaptation, expanding out the rather sparse detail of the novel but remaining firmly within the feel and tone of the original - dark, offbeat, whimsical, with its own inexorable emotional logic. It's effectively a slightly more coherent and instrumental take on Alice in Wonderland, with its latent threat considerably more up-front. Coraline retains her slightly bloody-minded strength of mind and purpose, given quirky life by the puppetry, although I was a bit miffed that her final triumph is taken away from her, allowing her to be rescued by the introduced boy character rather than setting up her own calculated trap as in the original. Nonetheless I'll forgive the film that given that everything else was so true to the book. The stop-motion animated format was marvellously in tune with the story's rich grotesquerie, which in the case of the Other World performance of Miss Forcible and Miss Spink is almost, but not quite, too over-the-top (I may have been permanently scarred by the obese version of Botticelli's Venus ...) The mouse circus, on the other hand, is charming and not too cutesy, and the fantastic garden is a thoroughly magical addition (snapdragons, I want one). The Other Mother herself is also wonderful, morphing gradually into a spidery, threatening, spindly-fingered horror.

From the opening sequence's clever 3D framing and its occasional moments when the Other Mother's spider-fingers reach terrifyingly from the screen, the film's potentially gimmicky three-dimensionality is both beautifully in keeping with the story, and severely subordinated to it. I can't get over how real, how vivid and how magical the three-dimensionality is, particularly the more exaggerated moments, restrained to an elegant minimum, when things reach out of the action into the air midway between your seat and the screen and simply hover there, tangible and semi-solid. They transcend the two-dimensionality of the film world in an almost impossibly enchanted fashion - it's like seeing real magic embodied in space. The most vivid moments of this, strangely enough, were probably the opening sequences with the 3D logos, which are geometrically solid - implausible, science fictional, holographic realities in the mundanity of the familiar cinema setting. There was also a lovely moment in the end credits where the people sitting in front of us got up to leave, and wandered out with a winged bat-dog apparently circling their heads. I left the cinema with the rather sad feeling that any future 2-D film is, indeed, going to feel flat.

Comments

Horse, spoilers, stable door

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Though I did stop reading when I saw the words "final triumph".

Would have preferred some of this post to be behind a cut.

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I was working on the assumption that pretty much anyone who reads this blog is likely to have read the book anyway. Will sort. Apologies.

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

I can think of no reasonable excuse as to why I haven't read the book...

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[kadekraan.livejournal.com]

I have it; happy to lend it to you if you don't already have a copy.

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Yis plz

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

So, think up unreasonable excuses. The moons of Saturn got in your eyes!

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

I got grit in my eyes on my way both to and from work yesterday. It was probably grit from the moons of Saturn. (Well, I have no evidence that it wasn't.) So I shall gladly adopt your unreasonable excuse and raise it as my own.

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Damn, that was actually surprisingly annoying. Putting in a cut after the fact like that makes me realise that I actually structure a post completely differently if I'm planning to cut it. That first paragraph doesn't stand alone as it should.

*clutches brow in artistic angst*

Re: Horse, spoilers, stable door

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Thanks. And sowwy. Artistic angst not intended. Though I do think the first paragraph stands on its own terms - and makes me want to read the review! Movie first though.

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

Monsters vs Aliens in was good in 3D. We are looking forward to Coraline.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

We saw Coraline last night, and found it excellent. This review (and others) reference Pan's Labyrinth.

The 3d was excellent, and seems to be done with Circularly polarised light which frankly I would have scoffed at if Dr Who had configured his sonic screwdriver to emit it.