A Child's Plaything

Evaluating the films of Pixar poses a unique dilemma, as the pictures have praise so readily heaped at their feet that any critic using superlatives must preface the review with something on the order of "Sorry, but I really do think it's that great". In addition to this, since the film's target audience is allegedly children (I would argue that the 'target audience' is really said children's parents, who must take their kids to the latest family fare as surely as they must buy into the latest fad, but I digress), this forces some to attempt to render any effort of examining the film critically in the positive or negative sense moot with the reminder that "It's just a kid's movie". Third, any dissenting opinion generally incites one, if not all, of the following comments: "99% of people like it, therefore the 1% who don't are wrong", "It's just for kids" or "You have no soul/hate children/just want attention/are insane" and so on. Pixar Studio's unique place in modern culture - at once regarded as high art by critics and loved by audiences - creates this flaw in the evaluation of their movies.

All Pixar is wrought with compromise, and the latest installment in the Toy Story franchise is no different. What I find so frustrating about Pixar is that all their films contain hints of what they are capable of if they weren't forced to create art with hundreds of millions of people's expectations in mind, and if ever a film illustrated the folly of giving the people what they want (or what men in suits think they want), Toy Story 3 is it. It begins with a stroking of the audience's nostalgia by providing a literal recreation of the first film's opening sequence, but making it a large scale action set piece invalidates the original's point, which is that imagination is the most exciting thing of all, but that's not even the real problem: the sequence is just mindless, unimaginative spectacle. This proved to be the tipping point that, instead of treading new ground, Pixar is content to simply rehash what has come before.

It's a shame that the plot never becomes anything more than hodgepodge of the first two, because the concept is inspired: Andy, now leaving for college, winds up donating the toys to a local daycare, and the toys band together and believe in each other and work with one another to escape from it (of course, it was a misunderstanding that led to the toys being donated - it would be too harsh for Disney to admit that a young man has no use for hunks of plastic anymore). This would seem to open the door for ruminations on the nature of love and mortality, but as usual with Pixar there is a wide gap between the kind of movie the film's makers wanted to make and what is actually presented on the screen. I respect that they try to lend weight to the characters that have become so iconic, but the fact is that by not exploring the toys' existential crisis more in depth Pixar actually trivializes the suffering they're attempting to depict (and, in some cases, Pixar even plays said suffering for laughs - such as when Barbie™ is abandoned by Andy's sister). It feels as though Toy Story 3 wants to be a much more serious movie than it can possibly be, more serious than it's allowed to be, and this makes much of the largely low brow humor seem disingenuous, as though it wandered in from a different movie. While the first two films had clever writing, Toy Story 3 relies on toilet humor (literally, in one instance) and lowest common denominator pop culture references to provide cheap laughs.

Never has the need for compromise in the work of Pixar been more evident than in the picture's climax, which has already become a famous sequence in its own right. The toys, through a convoluted series of misadventures (no, really) find themselves on a conveyor belt that leads to an incinerator, and this sequence is some of the most effective imagery Pixar has ever created; the flames are animated so vividly that you can almost feel the heat (and I saw it in 2D). This sequence culminates in the most fully realized individual moment in any Pixar film, as the toys fall in to the incinerator and interlock hands with one another, and Woody, always the hero thinking up clever ways of escape, realizes he is powerless and accepts his implicit fate. Only it's not implicit, as a literal Deus Ex Machina comes in to save the day, morphing the sequence from an examination of mortality and family into just another cheap thrill in literally the blink of an eye. Coming from someone who grew up with these films (I was 7 when the first came out), it's impossible to deny this sequence's effect, but it's devoid of any real consequence because it's not even a remote possibility that Pixar will kill the toys, even though that's probably the most fitting ending imaginable. After this, we're given an embarrassingly saccharine ending where Andy gives the toys to a neighbor's child, playing with them one last time before moving into adulthood. It's one of those moments like Pauline Kael described in her review of The Sound of Music, where you can hear all the noses blowing in the theater at once. This is yet another of Pixar's manufactured sentiments, a cheap and borderline insulting attempt to package the depth of human experience in a nice little bow.

All of Pixar's films contain brilliant, fully realized moments, but for every moment they force you to step back and marvel at their artistry there are many more moments that are compromised, mechanical, and banal; context is everything. While Pixar attempts to create art in an environment that exists only to stifle it, they - unwittingly or not - take part in the great lie that we have always told, and will continue to tell, children: that things will always turn out alright in the end if you just have faith, stick together, and believe in each other. The bad guy will get his comeuppance and all will learn a valuable lesson. It's the Disney way.

The Human Touch: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson has always had something of a storybook aesthetic and with his latest, the consistently delightful Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Prince of the American Eccentrics has succeeded in doing something far greater - and much more meaningful - than merely adapting a story to the screen; he has brought a picture book, the kind we all grew up, to vibrant, spirited life. Adapting Roald Dahl's picture book to the screen (the first book he ever owned), Anderson has clearly made a deeply personal work, one you can sense he's wanted to make since he was a child. But Anderson is much too sophisticated an artist to make a film for the child inside him - he fleshes out Roald Dahl's story with a distinctly mature and adult sensibility, and that makes the film more rewarding than the typical family fare that pollutes multiplexes year after year. In a time when movies, especially animated movies, merely cater to their target audience to distract them for a few hours in exchange for a 10 dollar ticket, Wes Anderson has dared to bring a personal vision to the family movie.

Wes Anderson is a film maker who finds beauty in flaws, and in Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson manifests human foibles - quirks, if you will - in the form of animals: examinations of masculinity, femininity, family, adolescence, and class are all put at the forefront of the movie, and that in itself elevates it above the diversionary family entertainment that the form of animation is unfortunately confined to. Anderson paints the portrait of an animal society where every creature has a well defined role in the animal community; be it a real estate agent, a super, a chef, a lawyer, a musician, a painter, or the author of newspaper editorials - and this is an extremely meaningful linking of a capitalistic society to that of the natural order of the animal kingdom. This examination of a civilization where each person (animal) has a different but equally meaningful place in it is perhaps Anderson's most well pronounced rumination on the true meaning of a community, a theme that has always permeated his work.

But this film is also an examination on the manner in which a civilized society neuters our animal instincts. When we're first introduced to Mr. Fox, he is a wise cracking, arrogant, and untamed wild beast; sneaking onto farms and stealing himself some dinner. Needless to say, this is a dangerous line of work, what with angry farmers who don't like having their property raided by a hungry fox. In the opening scene, Mr. Fox and his wife get caught in a fox trap on a squab farm, and his wife drops the bombshell: she's pregnant, and should they escape the farmer's clutches, she demands that he find another, less dangerous, line of work. Flash forward to 2 years (12 fox years) later, and Mr. Fox is distinctly middle class; a domesticated father, husband, and working man, writing newspaper editorials for the local rag newspaper. He wants to move out of their little hole in the ground (literally) because it 'makes [him] feel poor', and he brazenly ignores the advice of his wife and lawyer (Bill Murray, here manifested in badger form, of the law firm Badger, Beaver & Beaver) and buys himself a house a stone's throw away from the farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean: "three of the nastiest, meanest, ugliest farmers in the history of this valley". He does this despite the fact that, as his voice of reason wife points out, foxes live in holes for a reason.

The three neighboring farms light Fox's instincts afire. Fox hatches a Master Plan with the help of his loyal opossum super and friend Kylie to raid each of the local farms over the course of three nights. As he and Kylie sneak onto the farms and steal the farmer's squabs, apples, and alcoholic cider, Fox's Master Plan quickly reveals itself to be more about territoriality than survival, more about hubris than instincts. Fox is simply getting a kick out of 'cussing with their heads'. With this, Anderson reduces masculinity to its animalistic essence, as the back and forth between the animals and the farmers becomes a literal pissing contest. The farmers first attempt to simply shoot the fox, so he runs into his house. The farmers tear the tree down, the foxes dig underground. The farmers rent tractors, the foxes dig further underground. Survival, not social status, becomes the priority of Fox and his family.

However, Fox's antics create something of a crisis in the film's animal society. The farmers' attempts to dig out the Fox family displaces the other animals within his community, and this leads to the typical Andersonian third act where the lovable scamp patriarch convinces everyone to give him another chance and join up with him in an attempt to correct his wrongs. In spite of the fact that this is typical thematic material for Anderson, it feels fresh, mostly because the cast of animal puppets recontextualizes motifs that have come to define Anderson as an artist.

And yet this film is more than an animated Life Aquatic - it is a technical marvel, the most incredible technical achievement of 2009, in spite of the crock of shit James Cameron and his partisans are trying to sell. Every frame is packed with detail; I've seen the film several times and still haven't even come close to absorbing all the nuances that adorn each and every one of Anderson's delicate compositions. And the plethora of detail isn't superfluous eye candy - art design has always been a vital element of his films, saying as much as about his characters and the world they inhabit as their words and actions do. The level of detail both in the puppets and the sets are simply eye popping, and the use of animal fur is one of the many little touches that makes the world feel organic. The animals look so real that you want to reach out and touch them.

The voice acting is also some of the best I have ever heard in an animated movie. Generally in American animated films, the 'name' casting feels utterly tacked on; take the animated films of Dreamworks, for instance, where the character and the voice that emanates from it don't seem to match at all. For Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson abandoned the usual process of recording in a studio and instead did location recording; in attics, cellars, and in the woods, and that brings a certain ease and spontaneity to the voice performances. There is such a relaxed, almost naturalistic delivery by the voice actors here that you almost completely forget that you're watching puppets synced up to a recorded soundtrack. George Clooney's smooth baritone is a perfect fit for the titular sly fox, Meryl Streep drops the theatrics and is instead soothing as Mrs. Fox, and Jason Schwartzman captures adolescence in all its awkward glory as poignantly as he did in Rushmore over 10 years ago. The supporting players are Anderson's usual cast of characters, merely manifested as animal puppets, so that lends a tone of familiarity to those of us who are familiar with his previous work.

Anderson acolytes and detractors alike will notice how perfectly he has transposed his aesthetic - perhaps the most singular vision in modern American movies - to animation, and some writers have used the fact that he seems to work more comfortably within the realm of animated movies to backhandedly diss his earlier work, specifically his last two, wildly misunderstood movies; as though making idiosyncratic pictures is the worst thing a person could do (perhaps these people live in a fantasy world where too many people are making movies on their own terms). Yes, animation affords Anderson the opportunity to fashion an even more distinct world then he usually does, but Anderson's cinematic universe is and always has been intimately connected to the world we live in, and this connection has never been more evident than in the stop motion puppetry of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Miyazaki Artistry, Disney Product

It's a testament to the film making craft of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli that even The Walt Disney Corporation's patented whitewashing (or should that be white supremacy?) can't rob Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea of its artistry --- only its culture. The circumcision of the title from the elegant, alluring Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea to the decidedly more marketable Ponyo is only part of Disney's pandering to Western xenophobia; as per their tradition with Western Studio Ghibli releases, all the original voices are dubbed with marketable 'stars', a move that draws more attention to itself than anything. Instead of the voices fitting their characters as they do in the Japanese versions, they just find 'name' people to voice the roles for Western audiences, depriving these animations of their spirit and their ethnicity. This is as transparent move to appease jingoism as I've ever seen, not to mention it encourages illiteracy amongst children and adults (illiteracy in third-world nations is the only reason dubbing became a practice in the first place, then laziness made sure it was here to stay). The more voracious the marketing campaign (it's opening in 800 whole theaters. That's, what, a third of what G-Force and G.I. Joe got?), the more these distinctly Hollywood personalities stick out from the film itself. Still, it's amazing that in an era where animation is dominated by Pixar and Dreamworks banality that something as benign and visually imaginative as Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea even made it to American shores in the first place. That we must tolerate DisneyCo tarting up what they view as mere product is the sad price we must pay.

Miyazaki's films bring an Eastern folk-element to traditional coming of age stories, and this is probably why his films have struck as much of a chord overseas as they have in Japan. In spite of the fact that Miyazaki perceptively documents Japanese culture and social issues --- bourgeois attitudes, war, and environmentalism in his latest three films --- he is never patronizing or moralistic, mercifully avoiding the Pixar trap. Ponyo concerns a young anthropomorphic goldfish-girl's (it's a lot less contrived than I make it sound) quest to break out of her fish form and become a human; touches of Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid abound, but Miyazaki avoids directly reminding us of any thematic similarities by fleshing out the story with his own unique sensibility. Ponyo, even in its more low-key, quiet moments, is packed with Miyazaki's typically eye popping visual palette; every frame feels like the illustrations in a storybook brought to life, fleshed out with Miyazaki's breathtaking sense of color and wondrous, seemingly limitless visual imagination.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea may be more simplistic and directed at children than some of Miyazaki's other, more universal works, but it's refreshing seeing a movie that actually pays homage to the depth of childhood experience. Unlike Pixar, who has taken to portraying their core demographic as fat, lazy, and ignorant, Miyazaki has the utmost respect for children; he portrays them as pure, wise, and intelligent. When Ponyo first ventures to the shore and is captured by a young five year old boy Sosuke, he immediately takes to her, as we took took to animals as children. The central conceit of a goldfish struggling to become human is a brilliant metaphor for what we projected onto our pets as children; we thought of them not as creatures inferior to us, but as companions and friends that were our responsibility. There is a scene early on where Sosuke is afraid he's lost Ponyo forever --- without even thinking about what could happen to him, he rushes out into the water trying to find his fish. As he struggles, hopelessly, to find his lost pet, I felt the same sadness and frustration that the little boy on screen felt; anyone who has ever lost an animal has probably felt the same kind of outpouring of emotion, the feeling both of missing the pet and of feeling like you let the animal down. It's because Miyazaki has such an intimate connection to childhood that he's able to detail what it feels like to be one so effectively.

Miyazaki also understands the way adults don't take the concerns of children seriously; in Spirited Away, all the problems arise from the fact that the main character's parents don't listen to their child. In Ponyo, the titular character wants to escape from her undersea life and join the ranks of humanity, but her father won't hear of it --- partially because he doesn't like people very much (and with all the pollution of his undersea home, who can blame him?), but mostly because he doesn't want to lose his daughter. While it would have been easy to cast Ponyo's father into a villain role Miyazaki refuses to deny him his humanity; he doesn't have 'heroes' and 'villains' in the traditional sense, as such obvious storytelling cliches are beneath his sensibility.

Ponyo is one of few new releases to be daring enough to find joy in life, and to allow that sense of joy and wonder to be its guiding force. I have minor quibbles with it (Westernization aside), namely in the way the plot is resolved at the end, and the general cutesy nature of it all, but I can look passed them because Ponyo is a feast for the eyes and for the soul. I can also let the how child-friendly it all is slide because children deserve a movie that respects them instead of condescending towards them --- and children (bright children, anyway) respond to this element of Miyazaki's films. Their emotional simplicity, their honest reflections of human experience, and humanity are essential values that have long since disappeared from Disney's work. When so many animated movies have the cold feel of being made on a computer (including, in many cases, a story that feels as mechanical as the animation), it's refreshing to see a work of animation that has a distinctly human touch; there is almost an impressionist quality to the drawings, which may not flesh out every solitary detail but are still visually ravishing. Ponyo proves that Miyazaki is one of the few popular artists saving animation from banality and formula, and he deserves nothing but support and respect for doing so.

The House that Pixar Built

The Pixar I remember as a 7 year-old going to see Toy Story for the first time is no longer. Their wit, which was once simultaneously clever, universal, and sophisticated, has regressed into heartless snark, bad puns, and toilet humor. While Up is never as smug and contemptuous as the second act of last year's Wall-E, it similarly never reaches the sublime heights Wall-E did in its first half. Rather, Pixar has whored itself out to sugar daddy Disney and Up is the bastard child of clashing sensibilities.

In the world of Pixar, everything--- be it toys, insects, monsters, fish, cars, rats, or robots--- is given abundances of humanity. Everything, that is, with the exception of human beings. When a portrait of human beings is moved to center stage in a Pixar film, they can't contain their contempt for humankind. Be it the portrayal of human beings as fat, lazy, and destructive that shattered the otherwise splendid Wall-E or the bland caricaturizations in Up, Pixar shows that human beings themselves are not their strong suit. Like Up's protagonist, Pixar has become the cranky, disaffected old-man batting passersby with its cane. Up attempts to indict today's children (their core demographic, no less) with an overweight boy-scout who is ignorant of the world outside his insulated corporate landscape; and while this portrait isn't quite as mean-spirited as the citizens of the Axiom in Wall-E, it's still moralistic and snarky. Coming from a studio owned by no less than The Walt Disney Company, this is the equivalent of the pot calling the kettle black.

Which is not to imply that Up doesn't have its moments--- it certainly does. Things start out well enough with the delightful short Partly Cloudy, Pixar's finest short film to date (though they've all been memorable in their own right). If the short that preceded Wall-E--- the magnificent Presto--- was Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes-esque, then this is a perfect 3D re-inhabiting of Walt Disney's own Silly Symphonies. Unlike the feature that follows it, Partly Cloudy's use of 3D is inventive, subtle, and effective--- and proves that Pixar still has chops as visual storytellers.

Unfortunately, things get problematic pretty quickly with Up. Wall-E, at the very least, had sustained brilliance for its first 45 minutes before regressing to formulaic banality and a hateful depiction of humanity in its second half. Up begins with an admittedly touching montage showing the main character, Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Lou Grant himself, Ed Asner) and his wife's life together--- the only thing that separated them was death. This is an extremely simple but eloquent statement on the nature of love and loss, and would rank with Wall-E's first half as flawless visual storytelling. Carl's wife, Ellie, looms over the remainder of the film like a ghost, only the ghosts are those in Carl's soul.

This would rank among Pixar's finest moments, judged apart from the rest of the movie. However, the moment immediately after Pixar has pulled our heart-strings with the death of Carl's loved one it plays Carl's status as a sad, lonely, bitter old man for cheap laughs; the "Habanera" comes in on the soundtrack, as though we're supposed to be amused by the fact that Carl's days are numbered. This tacky juxtaposition makes all the sap that follows (which there is a lot of) ring false. But we wouldn't want to upset the kiddies with tragedy, so instead Pixar tosses some infantile slapstick in with their oppressive schmaltz. This would explain the need for the fat, stupid, annoying child (is there any other kind in the world of Pixar?) as a comic-relief sidekick, and endless lame jokes involving talking dogs (apparently, that's a joke that Disney/Pixar thinks gets funnier each time they tell it).

There is a moment early on in the film that would have made Tati proud. An exterior shot of Carl's wonderfully colorful house cuts to reveal that the house is alone in a sea of apartment and office buildings; a splash of imagination and personality in an increasingly homogenized society, driven by corporate interests. However, coming from Disney, the studio largely responsible for the collective dumbing down of the masses, this notion is dubious; they tried to play the same card in Wall-E, and it was fallacious then as well. This sentiment is made all the more ironic by the endless demographic pandering that follows; it tries to appease the children with lowbrow humor, it tries to appease the adults with bad puns and trite ruminations on life and death. The universal quality that made early Pixar so special has become as mechanical and formulaic as the worst of Disney's modern-day product that they peddle as entertainment.

Pixar is far from talentless, but they are willing to squander their talent to their corporate masters. This makes them something worse than hacks--- it makes them sellouts. The 3D in this film is just a tacked on marketing gimmick; after the inventive use of 3D in Henry Selick's Coraline, this unimaginative and extraneous use of the device is unacceptable. Pixar is so flippant with their gifts and resources that they're willing to exhibit Up and its extraordinary color-palette a shade darker simply for the sake of added revenue. Indeed, through a good chunk of the movie I found myself peeking from behind my 3D-glasses to take in the film's wondrous and imaginative art-direction without the obtrusive and distracting 3D. But Pixar doesn't care about aesthetics anymore; everything about Up reaks of cold, calculated marketing--- it's every bit as manufactured as the Pavlovian reception of these increasingly poorly made films.

Take the central imagery of the flying house in Up. The image of the house taking off is a breathtaking one--- as the balloons burst through the chimney and rip the house out of its foundation, the extraordinary use of color, contrast and tonality in this sequence heightens our senses. This is wild, spectacular imagery that sets the imagination on fire. However, when the main duo reaches South America in its second half, it focuses on banal plot mechanics and the spectacular use of color and image becomes mere window dressing for Disney/Pixar's adherence to trite formula and mechanical plot-beats. Ultimately, the spectacular art-direction is little more than the equivalent of cinematic bubble gum.

Maybe Disney can't do any better than this--- they lost their spark long before they acquired Pixar--- but Pixar Studios certainly can, and we deserve no less. That they think we do is the highest of insults. Ever since Walt Disney's death in 1966, DisneyCo's focus has been solely on increasing GDP and making their stock-holders richer (the company actually never turned a profit during Disney's life-time, as he would continually invest his earnings into bigger and more daring projects), and they have done this through a series of conservative (read: safe) business moves. It's always about the bottom line for DisneyCo. Now Pixar, once defined by unique artistry, is content to be just another asset--- another link in The Walt Disney Company's morally bankrupt chain. This makes them worthy not of our cheers, but our jeers. And they pilfer this infantile crap in the name of children's entertainment, as though they deserve any less than the best we can give them.

If Animation Has a Name, Then it Must Be Charles M. Jones

"I’m not particularly known throughout the world for being a conductor of oceans, but I bet I’m one of the best. "

Last week, TCM broadcast the original documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, and it was one of the more illuminating half hours of television that I've recently seen. Using a technique similar to that of the recent Oscar nominated short I Met the Walrus and The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (the creators of the latter short made this film), the documentary animates the recollections of childhood that Jones describes, giving his stream of consciousness explanations of his life an added twinge of poignancy. Also, the cartoon figure that the film uses as a stand-in Jones as a child was drawn by Jones himself. It's a self-portrait in motion.

The film uses segments of an interview conducted with Jones before his death in 2002 to get to the core of his childhood, which helps illuminate why his characters have such universal appeal. They aren't just cartoon archetypes, they represent a portion of his psyche. This is why the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series have had such continuing impact; they aren't just strings of jokes and sight gags, the cartoons are representative of a world view that was shaped by experience.

"When I was two years old I think the event that occurred then probably had a great deal to do with my becoming an animator. Because I fell off a second story back porch on to a hunk of cement. I’m sure that it jostled my brain cells out of any hope that I would be a very logical child."

Watching Jones hand draw the Looney Tunes characters is one of the great joys of this documentary. It adds a personal touch to the characters we're all so familiar with. Jones talks about how these characters are, in essence, a part of the very fabric of his being.

"Pepe, he assumes immediately that he’s irresistible, so that’s actually the opposite of what I felt. I felt I was very resistible. People ask me about whether I’m some of the characters like Pepe. Of course I am, but I’m Daffy Duck, too."

It's this personal touch that separates Jones from the rest. Jones was so obsessive about his work that he believed that a single frame could make the difference between a good joke and a bad joke, and he would go through his films a frame at a time until they were just right. He treated his form like it was music, with every frame being a note in a comedic symphony. His films played with the synchronization of senses that Disney's Silly Symphonies had helped popularize, but I think the Warner Brothers shorts went even deeper with that core idea, because they played with that concept of image and its relation to music in unique, unexpected, and consistently hilarious ways.

The tone that runs through the documentary is one of poignant melancholy. One gets the impression that Chuck Jones was one of those people who had it all figured out, and we were lucky to get a glimpse of that understanding through his work. Many of his films stand out as the very best of the Warner Brothers cartoon catalog, which would put them among the best films ever made, and he among the great film makers. It's incidental that his understanding of humanity took the form of slap-stick one reel cartoons, that's merely the way in which he related to the world. "If I can find the quirk to something, I think I can understand a little bit about it." Perhaps Jones was a forebearer to Wes Anderson in that sense.

Being the shameless self promoter I am, I'd like to use this post as a chance to formally announce what I hope will be a recurring series for Medfly Quarantine, the Looney Tunes Project; where myself, my darling co-curator (still waiting on a contribution from her...), and anyone who feels like contributing will write up a Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies short. Be sure to check back for updates.

A Real Good Pal of Mine: Coraline

Imagination lives 240 times a second, in three dimensions, in Henry Selick’s Coraline. Selick’s film goes deeper with the theme’s presented in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as consolidating the technique of everyone through Jan Svankmajer, The Brothers Quay, Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson (how’s that for a diverse group of influences?). Coraline is a remarkable film because it acknowledges that visual expression and thematic richness go hand in hand; the content and the form are inseparable. Coraline expands perception of our world by way of alternate ones; “Give us our eyes, and our souls will be free”, Coraline understands art’s power as a unifier and a vital part of the human experience.

Like Alice in Wonderland, and its infinite riffs in pop culture, Coraline concerns a young girl’s quest to escape her dreary existence through the most effective means, fantasy. However, Coraline doesn’t fatuously accept the concept of utopia as the answer to psychological transgression. Whereas Del Toro’s literal minded allegory Pan’s Labyrinth amounted merely to shallow wish-fulfillment, Coraline analyzes the psychological implications of a utopian fantasy world; the Orwellian dangers inherent in a society so blatantly manufactured. Coraline dares to ask profound questions on the nature of existence while simultaneously connecting these existential queries with childhood, the only time in life when this sense of mystery could come off as palpable as it does.

And in terms of of connecting with that central mystery of childhood, Coraline does it as effectively as anything in the filmography of Steven Spielberg. The brilliant, subtle use of 3D invites the observer to become a partner in a kind of cinematic dance, and the visual 'cues' highlight the psychological state of our main character. Her evolution from self absorbed, whiny child to enlightened, rational young adult is flawlessly conveyed by the film's visual language. In the beginning of the film she finds nothing excitable about her ho-hum existence, and thus the world is painted in grays and muted colors. Her first descent into the alternate world is so visually extravagant and colorfully eye-popping that it's literally overpowering--- however, the subversive creepiness of the other world is highlighted immediately, and slowly builds with each passing descent. By the end, the language has been inverted; the fantasy world is a nightmare, and suddenly you find yourself yearning for the real world, where (comparatively speaking) things make sense. Sure, you can't go play in the mud and eat cookies for dinner, but at least your mom doesn't turn into a giant spider and try to sew buttons into your eye socket.

Whether Coraline’s ‘other’ world is real or otherwise isn’t a central issue of the film, as it was with Pan’s Labyrinth; rather, in Coraline these two seemingly separate but concurrent universes are two sides of the same coin, opposing polarities of the id. Coraline charts the emotional growth of its titular character, and her rejection (and conquering) of her utopian dystopia is a reflection of the strong sense of moral values that the film conveys, as well as the high price it puts on individuality. She has the option of living in a world where her wants and needs are catered to, all she has to do is give up her eyes--- her windows to the world, the eyes through which she has garnered her unique perspective. Coraline, both the character and the film, puts a strong emphasis on the eyes being the key to our souls, the catalyst for understanding and illumination. The film's constant allusions to classic works of art (from The Birth of Venus to Starry Night) brilliantly underscore this point.

In addition to its artful recapitulation of traditional storytelling technique, Coraline displays what is easily the most effective use of the 3D process yet. Rather than having objects being thrown into the screen for the audience to relish in the simple pleasures of having shit thrown at them, Coraline’s use of 3D is never distracting or gimmicky; it effectively highlights the visual transcendence of the fantasy world, and the more morose nature of the real world. It is unquestionably the most inventive use of the process yet, an ingrained part of the way the story is told instead of an extraneous device to make the unappealing seem more appealing. Rather than tacking on the technique for a contrived sense of excitement, Coraline’s visual invention opens up its thematic expression.

Coraline avoids placating and cuts to a core emotional truth of childhood; the world we inhabit may not be perfect, but at least it’s real. Through the hardships experienced in the fantasy world, Coraline learns to appreciate and understand that while the world is not something that is going to cater to one's desires at every passing moment, it still beats the fraudulence of a manufactured society where individuality is suffocated. The film's brilliant final sequence highlights the maturity and new found appreciation of life Coraline experiences. After illustrating how nightmarish our dreams can be, the real world suddenly feels a lot more beautiful, warts and all.