A Sliver of Moonlight is a Thread on the Floor

Coraline (2009)
directed by Henry Selick
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Century 14 Downtown

Last week, Dave Kehr called Pinocchio "the most nocturnal of animated films," and reading it, I was reminded of what I didn't like about Henry Selick's unemotional Coraline. Ostensibly, the film aspires to a similar late-hour Pleasure Island with the eccentric boarding house where an unhappy girl follows her family to live. But Selick is too much the toyshop tinkerer, more interested in the mechanics of his stop-motion design - the rhythm in the stitch of a doll's head, or eyes replaced with thread and buttons - than anything truly childlike. Loneliness, say, instead of French & Saunders lending their long, dated squabbles to one more riff on the grotesque Triplets of Belleville (a terrible movie whose success animation will be paying for for a long time). You can do a lot with a ghost at the bottom of a well, but you have to trap the heroine there, and let her sit awhile in the silence before she wonders if the darkness is playing tricks on her. A kid could react with a scream or a question, but you can't make too many assumptions. Selick does.