Delayed Reaction: Coraline

The Pitch: "There's more money to be made from that Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride vibe. Someone get me Neil Gaiman!"

How I Came Into It: I have a distrust of stop-motion animated movies. They tend to be more interesting as an idea than in actuality. Look to any Aardman Animations movie for evidence of that. I like Neil Gaiman in principle and I was a fan of things like Stardust (based on his novel) and...well, I most just liked Stardust. That should be enough.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) There's a lot of confidence to how this movie is made. They clearly had a tone that they wanted and they stuck to it. This is creepier than I expected for what really is a children's movie.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes a movie gets praise simply because no one wants to admit they didn't like it? That's kind of how I feel about this. While I appreciated what the movie was doing, I thought it was completely lifeless. It's very similar to how I felt about The Polar Express. In an attempt to avoid the busyness that a lot of animated movies have, they accidentally took away the life from any given scene. The moments between things happening had nothing, if that makes any sense. Then, I see that it has a really high score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a bunch of the reviews found new ways to say "It was a little dull". Perhaps I'm reading a lot into all that.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend