I gritted my teeth through the first fifteen minutes of Coraline. The new children’s film, written, directed, and art-directed by Henry Selick and based on the novel by hard-core graphologist Neil Gaiman, is hard on mothers. Coraline’s parents write catalog copy for a crunchy gardening company. Mom and Dad are writing under deadline, and they have no time for Coraline. The goofy dad makes loving stabs at humor, but Mom is all frowns and furrows. “Can’t you see that Mommy’s working?”
Yes, I certainly can. Like Cora-Mom, I spend many hours moving type on my kitchen computer while keeping kids at bay. I could see where this movie was headed: like so many contemporary Parables of the Over-Scheduled Parent, the story would nag, poke, and shame the mother into learning how to cook, smile on the hour, and turn off the spell-checker long enough to say “I luv u.”
But no. Coraline discovers a magic passageway that leads directly to “Her Other Mother”: a creature at once all-loving and all-powerful in her oven mitt, kid-friendly meals, and Coralingian love fests. Everything is perfect about her, except those button eyes …
Yes, of course, Coraline rescues herself and her real parents from the bitch with the buttons. More significant for this viewer, however, both Coraline and the audience end up accepting her parents as they are – busy, smart, and, like real grown-ups everywhere, under genuine pressure from actual deadlines. Once Mom and Dad submit the catalog copy to I HEART MULCH, everyone unbuttons a bit, and they take a few minutes to smell the daisies, not just write about them.
But we all know that the next deadline is around the corner. We’ve also come to realize that maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
— Julia Lupton · 2009-02-18
|
THE BOOK