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When I heard Henry Selick would be making the book Coraline into a movie, my reaction was, "Oh my gosh, they're gonna botch it."
I was right. The story was faithful to the book (with the exception of the added unneccessary character, Wybie), but in terms of character development, they were unfaithful. In the book Coraline is bored, clever, and actually likable. In the movie she's an unlikable brat! In the book, her real mother is sarcastic but sweet. In the movie, she's sarcastic and just as unpleasant as her daughter. Mrs. Forcible and Mrs. Spink are corky but endearing in the book. In the movie they're flat-out weird cougars. The drawing of Mrs. Forcible, Mrs. Spink, and Mr. Bobiensky were very crude and uncalled for. The only characters who were faithful in the book were the Other Mother/Beldam/whatever she's called, the Other Father, and Coraline's real father.
As for the movie in general, it quickly goes from creepy with slight enchantment to trippy insanity that is neither haunting nor magical. I thought the garden scene and the first dinner Coraline has with the Other Parents were wonderful and the part where the Other Mother turns into a spider was pretty sick, but the mice circus scene was weak, the scene where she's looking for the second soul when the pink hand and green hand grab her was trippy, most of the characters felt one-dimensional and empty, and just when you think the movie has ended, they do this thing in which the Other Mother's hand chases after Coraline in a desperate attempt to get her. At that point the movie just falls apart. The end (when it finally comes) was the most cliche, forced, contrived, put-together-at-the-last-minute ending I've ever seen.
I tried to like it, but the whole movie's just exhausting and unpleasant with a bratty, main character who by the time her good side starts to show, my sympathy for her was already out the window.
Henry Selick's movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas, is creepy but it never loses its magic and it never goes from creepy to insane and Jack Skellington is a very sympathetic character, as well as Sally and the Halloween Town people. Yes, Oogie Bogie is a nutjob and I don't like his musical number, but other than that the movie is dark, creepy, and fun. I somewhat liked it the first time, then liked it alot the second time. It's strangely enjoyable.
Coraline, on the other hand, is a movie that slowly loses whatever magic it had as the movie goes on and the flatly written characters makes it even worse. Unlike Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline is exhausting, not enchanting.
I guess the worst thing of all is it doesn't have any emotional center. It's just about this bratty little girl who hates her life and goes into this parallel freakshow version of her world and all this weird, trippy stuff happens and blah, blah, blah.
If you disagree, that's perfectly cool. If you think Coraline's the greatest movie ever made, that's cool, too. You're entitled to your opinion.
For me, this movie was basically a noisy, insane, over-the-top spectacle.
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