cute as a button in the eye

The movie is captivating, but the book is twenty kinds of terrifying, even now, ten years after I first read it. As disturbing as the movie may have been to some, the things Selick added really serve to cushion just how horrific the story really is.

First of all, the character of Wybie does not exist in the book. Coraline is facing all of this nearly alone, with her only help coming from the sly comments of the cat, a warning from the circus mice, and the stone given to her by her neighbor, presented with no comment but that it “makes the unseen seen.”

Second, the Other Parents are never quite as warm (and, dare I say, normal) as they are in the gifs above. They’re described as having paper-white skin and the Other Mother’s hair is said to move on its own, and her long, red, claw-like nails don’t ease any uncertainty that she is absolutely, positively up to no good. The first time Coraline meets them, they (and the rest of the Others) seem to be playing roles (for whatever reason, Coraline does not seem to pick up on this), like they all know what to say and what to do and are simply waiting for Coraline to make her move in their terrifying play world. This is shown to be partly true when the Other Parents tell her they know she’ll be back soon after she refuses the buttons - this time, to stay.

Third, the Other Mother commits atrocities that really should not have been in a book for anyone not fully grown up. She physically deforms the world around Coraline to slow her progress in their game beyond any mild traps the movie portrays, and, instead of turning the Other Father into the wandering pumpkin-thing seen in the film, she simply ceases to use him and throws his body away in the cellar, leaving him to rot with whatever bit of sentience he has left. She begins to lose her touch, as Coraline gains the upper hand. Her world doesn’t just become a nightmare - it falls apart completely. No creepy but oddly cool bug furniture here, just the house that now appears to be a child’s drawing. Whatever the Other Mother is (a beldame, but something tells me she’s much more ancient and powerful than that), she does not give half a hump about what she has to do to ensnare Coraline. Destroy the supporting characters of her twisted creation? Done. Allow herself to be dismembered to ruin Coraline’s life in the normal world? Not even gonna bat an eyelash.

On a final, personal note, imagine eight year-old me, ignored by my parents, absorbed in the story and identifying with Coraline from the start. Imagine me finishing this bloodcurdling book and immediately thinking of my basement, where there is still a locked door that my grandmother swears up and down is nothing more than a storage room, but has not once in my (or my mother’s) lifetime unlocked.

A decade later, at the Opening Night of the Coraline musical, I was sitting next to Morgan, Merilee’s youngest daughter, and told her how her not being scared had made the book happen. And she said “I was terrified. But I needed to find out what happened next. So nobody knew.”

"They say even the proudest spirit can be broken... with love."

“Hungry, aren’t you?”

The Other Father is the only character from the Other World who is shown eating. Despite the Other Mother’s clear passion and talent for cooking, during meals, her plate is always empty.

In the Dinner Scene (shown above) she doesn’t eat, but instead simply offers Coraline more food. In the Dinner/Breakfast/Food? scene she’s seen feeding scraps to the snapdragon plants on the table instead of eating food herself. Throughout the movie all the Other Mother eats is half a beetle, which alludes to her inhuman - and spiderlike - nature.

That being said, the Beldam does have the ability to swallow objects (the key) and cough them back up almost instantly as if they were simply at the back of her throat. This led me to wonder - does she even have a stomach? Or any kind of digestive system, that is? The key should have been in her tummy by then. And I think there is evidence, and reasons, to support my idea.

As you probably know the Beldam feeds off the souls of kids, or as the Ghost Children put it, eats up their lives. This would mean she’d have no reason to eat real food as the souls keep her alive. In her true form (needle hands, spider legs, exoskeletal white face and all) her waist is stick-thin, with obivously no room at all for any kind of internal organs. There’s no way you could fit an entire digestive system in her, well, backbone. She only ate the beetle because she liked the taste and not because she was hungry.

However, the Other Father eats during the mealtime scenes, and he shouldn’t have to; as he himself put it, “[The Other Mother’s] strength is our strength” (meaning the inhabitants of the Other World depend on the Beldam’s consuming of souls to keep her, and them, alive). But since he was an exact replica (save for the button eyes and orange monkey slippers) of the real Charlie Jones, he’d have a digestive system and would be able to eat. But this is probably for the sole purpose of making Coraline feel more trusting and comfortable when eating with the Other Parents; I mean, imagine sitting down to dinner with two button-eyed people saying they’re your other parents… and then they just stare at you for the entire meal. You’d probably think the food’s poisoned, wouldn’t you? But the Other Father eats to reassure Coraline this is not the case.

Though she looks very similar to Mel Jones, the Beldam is not a replica but is simply disguised to look like it. She wouldn’t inherently have the same anatomy as Mom #1, therefore she wouldn’t have a digestive system.

There’s nothing showing the Beldam making the doll but darn it if that’s not the most aesthetically pleasing scene in stop motion animation:

The appearance of the tunnel is never described (other than it being musty and her feeling a force behind her) so they made a psychedelic tube: 

In the book, she meets the three ghost children at a generic picnic but the movie, for reasons I will always love, decided to show them against an animated, interconnecting, version of the Starry Night:

The blue hair, the garden, the world falling apart—

Everything is tweaked to be more visually pleasing.

Coraline (2009), dir. Henry Selick.

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