Word: motherly
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...right. In the deeply, darkly conservative spirit of most fairy tales, which are not adventures but horror stories, Coraline will find that all those sweets and sweet words are simply fattening her up for the kill, like Gretel in the gingerbread house. And Other Mother is worse than a Stepford mom. She's... well, we'll just say she's very bad, and has been so for a very long time. Almost as nefarious as her plans for her new recruit is the poison she pours in the girl's ear, suggesting that Coraline's real parents may have permanently...
...figures are angular and mostly spindly, like undernourished Europeans after the war; they might be denizens of pestilential Vienna in the 1949 thriller The Third Man. Some of the characters are distinctly European, like Bobolinsky and the theatrical ladies. But even Coraline and the Cat, and certainly Other Mother in her final, spidery metamorphosis, lack the soft lines and winning personalities found in most U.S. animation. Indeed, the girl's "real" environment and her dream-nightmare one are equally remote from the reassuring landscapes in standard American cartoon features. That chilly visual vocabulary, along with a narrative that too often...
...Laika story is one of a father's indulgence, Coraline's is about a mother's indifference. It's exactly the kind of book/movie that a writer/animator would dream up to convince his kids that, no matter how much he ignored them while he was doing his important work, they're better off in this family than in any they may dream of joining. As Gaiman puts it, "sometimes the people who love you may not pay you all the attention you need; and sometimes the people who do pay you attention may not love you in the healthiest...
...real" world Coraline will get the chance to be a heroine, to vanquish the villains and win her parents' attention (though Real Mother's lips remain Perma-pressed). But the happy ending doesn't dilute the story's moral, obvious enough to stick like a needle in any kid's eye. Both the book and movie warn kids to distrust the kindness of strangers, and find refuge in the prison of the status quo. It's important, Coraline says, for children to learn that real life, though it may be preferable to being devoured by a Spider...
...Palin, Bristol • various silly explanations for origin of first name of are offered by eternally truth-bending mother...