J and I drove out to the Eastside in order to take J's nephew (which, I guess by dint of marriage makes him my nephew as well) out for lunch and a movie. While the basic conceit of Coraline was interesting, I was a bit hesitant about watching the film because I really did not care for Nightmare Before Christmas and I've been finding Tim Burton's one note to be rather tiring (and, yes, I realize he didn't actually direct or write the film but he's still connected to it and sometimes that's just enough).
Nonetheless, it's what Big A. wanted to see and so that's what we saw ... in 3-D of course.
After having been inundated with high-tech CGI, it was really nice to get back to some old-school stop-action animation. I guess it's similar to the whole digital vs. analog debate. While digital might be the more advanced technology, you still can't replicate the warmth of good, old-fashioned analog. Listen to an album on CD and listen to it on vinyl ... there's really no contest. Well, I'm not going so far as to suggest that CGI isn't worthwhile or that it can't have warmth but, up to this point, no amount of CGI can create that sense of realness that stop-action can. Look at an old episode of Wallace and Gromit and then watch Flushed Away.
Getting back to Coraline, the first 90% of the film was fantastic (and the 3-D effect, after a few minutes, began to feel very natural). The problem was that it tried to wrap up the story far too quickly. The film began as a very interesting psychological narrative that looked melded childhood fantasy and nightmare into a single vision but once we hit the third act, Coraline spiraled into a third-rate action film whose denoument did not do justice to the rest of the film.
0 Comments
|
Archives
January 2016
|