Coraline and animation

Coraline - We had two personal connections to this movie. We just had dinner in Chicago with Neil Gaiman (and 750 other people). He wrote the book "Coraline" and was being honored with the 2009 Newberry Medal for "The Graveyard Book". And Mary went to elementary school in New Jersey with Henry Selick, the director of "Coraline" the movie.

Children's movies cannot be long (this one was 1 hour and 45 minutes) and that's a good thing. And I really liked this one, mostly, for what it was not, which is Shrek - possibly the worst animated film ever made. There were none of those wink-wink adult references to adult things, put in there to keep Mom and Dad from getting bored. There were no stupid movie references that- once again - are designed to make adults feel smug and superior. (Like the references to "The Matrix" in "Shrek") And the artistic references were motivated: the trapeze lady recites Shakespeare (Mike thinks Hamlet) because she's a retired actress/showgirl.



Animated movies are free to use space in ways that are difficult, expensive or just impossible in live-action films, especially those without special effects. There was quite a bit of moving toward and away from the camera in "Coraline" and, now that I think about it, was probably put in there to justify the 3D version (I'm thinking of that trapeze again and any scene involving the acrobatic neighbor).



I'm not sure why, but spatial relationships are just more interesting in live action than in animation, possibly because it's just so easy to do in animation (you start with Wile E. Coyote's eyeball as he falls off the edge of the mesa until he becomes a little puff of smoke as he lands on the desert floor below) and it's so hard to do in live action.



I'm thinking of that opening shot of Touch of Evil. It starts off with what we think of as a traditional close-up: the clock. But it's not a close up at all -and it's not just a clock either. Instead of a cut, the camera pulls away (or, I should say, the clock is pulled away), and we see that the clock is really the timing device for the dynamite, and the space of the whole movie opens up before our eyes. It's a mise en scene tour de force. The camera keeps creating more and more space; more and more of the world; until the things we've been following, the car and the people, are destroyed in the explosion.

(The shot is supposed to be about seven minutes long. And now I'm wondering if the clock/timer is set for 7 minutes... but anyway the whole thing is also an exercise in real time, as opposed to movie time, because there are no cuts.)

I'll have to deal with this animation/space thing again. And I've got to see Touch of Evil again, too.



Historical footnote: that shot was, famously, not done in one take.