This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Nottingham chapter.
Based on the traditional Neil Gaiman novella, Selick’s Coraline has been remastered and re-released back into cinema for its 15th anniversary since its release in 2009. Its Tim Burton-esque style and use of stop motion brings a chilling strangeness and delightfully weird notion to this children’s fantasy classic, establishing Coraline as a autumn and Halloween favourite globally. Combining a sense of child-like wonderment and imagination alongside unsettling smiles and sown on button eyes, it is no wonder that many people try and put this movie into the horror category, despite its PG rating.
Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning, moves with her parents from Michigan and into the Pink Palace Apartments in Oregon, much to Coraline’s disapproval. Whilst she struggles to adapt to her new life, driven by her boredom and strained relationship with her mother, Coraline discovers a portal through a tiny door in a room of her new home, leading her to a very similar but alternate reality where her ‘other mother’ offers her the life she has always wanted and the attention she is so desperately craving. Despite originally establishing itself as a children’s film, Coraline toys with some complex ideas around mother-daughter dynamics, female agency and imagination, causing older viewers to rethink the way they may have watched this film 15 years ago.
It’s up for debate as to whether Coraline’s experiences are actually happening to her or if they are in fact a figment of her imagination, as the movie is told from her point of view, but it is evident that regardless of this it all spawns from a place of loneliness and isolation on Coraline’s behalf. When we first meet the ‘other mother’, she is an idealised fantasy of everything Coraline wants: she is a good cook, an amazing host, she is not invested in her work and is able to buy Coraline everything she has dreamed of that her real mother cannot. The dichotomy between Coraline’s real mother and the ‘other mother’ offers an intense and poignant insight in mother-daughter dynamics, displaying the vastly different and yet equally suffocating expectations of femininity, perfection and motherhood in society.
Coraline, as a young girl, is expected to be perfect, intelligent, curious but not annoyingly so, and to not speak when spoken too, and yet her character attempts to wildly contrast these expectations as she find her footing as a young person in society. She knows better than to trust blindly and is vigilant of everyone, including Wybie and his cat, whilst also remaining open minded and a dreamer. However, the longer she stays in the other dimension the harder it becomes to not give in to the other mother and her desires, the most frightening being allowing her to sew buttons into her eyes. Arguably this metaphor acts as a way that Selick is demonstrating womanhood and a journey into adolescence, as Coraline struggles to fight the urges to fit in and change herself for the other mother and her wishes, instead of staying true to herself. The buttons attempt to blind Coraline to the real world and the things she truly loves, they wish to distort her childlike wonderment and bring her into the real world where she trusts blindly and stops asking questions.
The ‘other mother offers’ viewers a raw and honest insight into what happens when women crack under the pressure of motherhood and perfection. The ‘other mother’ is a highly gendered role, she cooks dinner for her husband every night and is rarely seen out of the kitchen, she is always beautifully dressed and put together and her voice is always soft and calm. The ‘other mother’ is desperate to be loved and have Coraline stay with her and the other father, but within this desperation, she begins to suffocate and is unable to meet the expectations that society sets for her. She can no longer remain composed and perfect and instead spirals into a violent and deprived mess that needs love to survive. She is flawed when she is perfect and she is flawed when she is not, and perhaps that is what both mothers exist to represent, that perfection is unattainable.