According to a recent interview, Neil Gaiman wanted Henry Selick to do a stop-motion adaptation of Coraline even before the book was released to the public. Gaiman said that Selick’s first draft of the screenplay was “too much like the book and we needed to expand it.” And my question to that is “WHY???”

At its heart, Coraline is a fairy tale, and to have watched Selick’s meticulous work in driving a stake into that heart was at times more than I could bear. Maybe I’m being a purist, not only for the book itself but for fairy tales in general. As metaphors for growing up or lessons on leading a good like, fairy tales need only the hero to get their point across, mostly that life is a solitary adventure and that one is totally responsible for one’s own actions. They may not always start out capable, but by the end of their stories, fairy tale heroes (usually) accomplish their aims and have become clever and apt. If this is so, then why did Coraline herself have to be less capable in the movie than she was in the book? Why did she need Wybie to help her execute her less-than-clever plan at the end? I really disliked Coraline’s coming into her own being shoved aside like that for… what? The sake of having a sidekick-cum-knight? The boys in the audience who think girls need a boy’s help? For girls who thought they didn’t need a boy’s help? For a man who makes his living by writing good stories, it’s amazing to me that Gaiman willingly lets others treat them this way.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the movie. I did. Seeing the puppets move, their hair ruffle, their bodies jump and twist, and knowing the time and effort the stop-motion animation process requires was stunning (even moreso in 3-D). If I had a complaint at all (beyond the above), it was that Teri Hatcher was Madea levels of mad as the real mother. So much so that I thought the movie was going to be some kind of reversal of the book, much the way Gaiman took on Snow White in his Snow, Glass, Apples. Sadly, I was instead forced to watch an intolerable (and at times violently uncomfortable) mother-daughter dynamic that begged for court-ordered emancipation. Why Hatcher went to this extreme and why she was permitted to do so is a question I hope someone will answer one day.

All in all, had I not read the book, the movie of Coraline would have been satisfactory, but like so many adaptations of popular books, the movie doesn’t live up to Gaiman’s written words. And it’s his own fault.