How Does Coraline Book Differ From The Movie?

Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a creepy, very slowly building up horror story. It is written in a sparse but vivid style that you can very easily picture. It is probably worse to describe the button eyes of the Other Mother than for me to explain them, for you to picture them. Coraline is a beautifully made movie with a lot of very wonderful and detailed work with the stop-motion characters and the settings. The garden and the alternate-circus-with-mice in particular were wonderful. Henry Selick has made Coraline and Wybie into two main characters, so Coraline has someone to play off against in this version. The book Coraline is alone for most of the story. I also felt that the ending of the book was rather quieter than the movie, and more unsettlng in the long run. The final chase scene in the movie was more action-oriented than the close-up and still of the two Mothers in the end of the book, with the fingers of the Other Mother possibly twitching down in the dark.

I think one of the best things Gaiman did with the parent-less protagonist is make her parents so believably neglectful but not in an evil or cartoonish way. They’re just totally pre-occupied and human and don’t realize what Coraline is going through. The movie tries to emulate this but they come off slightly different. I also really love the Cat in the book. He’s this totally enigmatic and very philosophical animal and he never talks to Coraline but instead tries to convey his messages in other ways. The movie Cat has lots of dialogue and is very fun but not at all as mysterious and cool as the Book-Cat. Both are amazing but in very different ways. The book is a sort of whispered nightmare and the movie is a very real and very vibrant and very different sort of dream that one can get lost in forever.

Neat post comparing the Gaiman novel Coraline to the film adaptation. For one thing, Coraline is a very short novel, running to about 100 pages or so, and every sentence is just churning away with this creepy, chill horror feeling that never, ever, lets up. And yes, the film tries to tell the whole full story of the novel, but that translates to longer. And in terms of the Mother, in the book she very, very gradually changes, and you notice her edges getting sharpened only rather late in the game. But the film makes her very sinister from the very, very beginning: needle fingers and needle-like movements and so on. It’s a very different take on the same basic material: Coraline the novella is a dark little folktale and Coraline the movie a gothic little fairytale with a fair amount of humor, too. The neighbors, for example, are entertaining as hell, as is Bobinsky and his mad, crazy dancing.

The main character in the book is around 8-9 years old while the movie makes her about 10-11 years old and more proactive. The greatest fear that takes place in the book is Coraline feeling small and being unable to do anything while the movie Coraline is very spunky. Also, the soundtrack in the movie is beautiful and hauntingly done by Bruno Coulais while the book doesn’t have any music and the silence between the pages is very powerful and you can hear the creaks of the old house.

The main difference is the tone. The book is a quiet, unsettling fable. It trusts children to be able to deal with unknown and frightening things. The movie is darker, but also more of an adventure. All of the book’s scariest moments are very implicit and are left to the reader’s imagination. However, in the movie, everything is shown to the audience. We see the beldam in all her hideous glory and we find out what happens to the ghost children. Both are excellent in their own way. However, the book lingers long after the pages have been closed, much like a cold spot in a room.