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Coraline DVD Review

Reviewed by on Jul 15, 2009
Rating: 4 Star Rating

July 21, 2009 is the day Tim Burton (of A Nightmare Before Christmas fame) fans are waiting for – the release of Coraline the movie on DVD!

Story

Based on the book by author Neil Gaiman, Coraline tells the story of a very bored but very interesting little girl named – you guessed it – Coraline Jones (11) who moves into a magical – or, should we say, slightly demonic – new house. There she discovers a passage to an alternate world that’s home to bizarrely different versions of her own parents and neighbours.

At first this other world seems like a magical and wonderful place to Coraline, until she discovers that her Other Mother is actually an evil witch who has imprisoned the souls of three other children. And – brace yourselves – she’s taken their eyes with her, as well!

It’s up to Coraline to find a way to get back the kids’ eyes and transport their spirits back to the real world so they can crossover to the afterlife where they belong.

Special Effects

Besides telling a great story, the Coraline movie on this special Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD is a 3-D stop-motion extravaganza. The animators and effects specialists who worked on this masterpiece crafted, made and animated all the objects, characters and things you see in the movie through an animation process called stop-motion.

Stop Motion

True Tim Burton fans (and techies, too) will be interesting to know what stop motion is and how it works. It’s an animation technique that makes non-living objects appear to move on their own by posing and moving them in front of a camera. Say you wanted to make a character look like it was swinging its arm. You’d take a picture of the character, then move its arm by a fraction, take another picture, move its arm another fraction, take another picture and so on until the action is completed. It may take thousands of photos, which are then played back as a film strip on a computer in rapid succession, making the character look like it’s swinging its arm on its own. Kind of like a flip book, but much more intricate and complicated.

Specs

When you get the Coraline Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD, you’ll receive the following features:

  • 2-D movie version
  • 3-D movie version
  • Four pairs of 3-D glasses

Coraline DVD Rating: 4

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