Movies

The Avocado Movie Club #34: Coraline (2009)

Welcome to the Movie Club! Today’s movie is Henry Selick’s Coraline!

Russian poster, possibly fanmade?

Coraline is named after its titular character, a young girl who moves with her family into a large old house separated into individual apartments. Coraline is adventurous and quirky but feels ignored by her parents who are consumed with their work writing for a gardening magazine despite not enjoying gardening. Within this house she finds a doorway into an alternate dimension created by an entity called the Other Mother, where colourful copies of her parents and neighbours shower her with gifts and candy, but Coraline soon finds out that this idealized world might be too good to be true. 

Coraline is based on the Neil Gaiman novella of the same name and was produced by Laika Studios as their first feature film. It was warmly received by critics and audiences, going on to earn a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and a dedicated cult following.1 With a $60 million budget, it was not initially a big success in the box office as it only earned $125 million during its initial run, but with re-releases in 2023 and 2024, it earned another $60 million, making it a box office success over-all.2 I took those numbers from Box Office Mojo, which are lower than the ones on The Numbers, but The Numbers also mentions an additional $70 million in domestic home video sales alone.3 What a different time it was! 

Trivia:456 

  • Wybie was an original character created for the movie. Many people online say that this was a way to get across her internal monologue from the book by giving her someone to talk to. This makes a lot of sense but I can’t find an original source for that, so I don’t know if that’s entirely true or if someone came to that conclusion on their own and it’s just been spread throughout the years online because it feels correct. A quote from Selick states that Wybie exists “to give Coraline someone to kind of go up against directly and other changes”
  • Coraline was the first stop motion film to be conceived and photographed in Stereoscopic 3D, as well as one of the first to be produced on “Ones”, meaning it was shot on 24fps for a smoother animation instead of 12fps. 
  • Althea Crome, a fibre artist, was hired specifically to knit miniature clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair.

What did you think? Share your thoughts below! 

Up Next: Spooky season will end with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas! Is it weird to watch that this early? Perhaps it will bridge the gap into the end of the year holiday season nicely. We will meet to discuss it on October 31 at 12PM EST. Check out the trailer and where it’s playing below: 

USA

  • Stream:  Prime Video, AMC +, Cineverse, Fandor (also via Prime Video, allegedly), Fawesome, Kanopy, Metrograph, Midnight Pulp, Mometu, Night Flight Plus, Peacock, Philo, Pluto TV, Screambox (also via Prime Video), Shout Factory TV (also via Prime Video), Shudder (also via Prime Video and Apple TV), The Roku Channel, Tubi, Xumo Play 
  • Rent or Buy: Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home, Google Play, YouTube

Canada

  • Stream: AMC+ (via Prime Video), Fandor (allegedly), Midnight Pulp, Shudder (also via Prime Video and Apple TV), Tubi
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube

UK

  • Stream: Shout Factory (via Prime Video), Tubi
  • Rent or Buy: Amazon
  1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coraline ↩︎
  2. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0327597/?ref_=bo_tt_ti ↩︎
  3. https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Coraline#tab=box-office ↩︎
  4. https://www.firstshowing.net/2009/interview-coraline-writer-and-director-henry-selick ↩︎
  5. https://www.laikahiddenworlds.com/coraline ↩︎
  6. https://web.archive.org/web/20090810084128/http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/issues/current-issue/articles/0209-knights ↩︎