There's a reason the eponymous girl is repeatedly misnamed "Caroline." "Coraline" is thoroughly a rearranging of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. I haven't read Neil Gaiman's novella, for which this stop-motion animated feature is based, but I'm familiar with "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There." Since reading them, I've been seeking out film adaptations and other pictures that are heavily Carrollian, of which this is one.
Coraline is Alice, then. She's guided by a black feline, as Alice was guided by the Cheshire Cat. The cats' disappearing acts, along with the talking, rather give this one away. A white mouse serves as the White Rabbit--leading Coraline through the rabbit hole behind a tiny locked door. The two burlesque actresses living beneath Coraline's family in their Victorian house have their similarities with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. And there's the circus performer Mr. Bobo living upstairs--"Bobo" as in "the Dodo," reportedly to be the caricature in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" of its author, whose stammer is said to have caused him to introduce himself as Charles "Dodo-Dodgson." Meanwhile, the surrogate authors within this story are occupied by Coraline's parents, although they only write for a gardening catalogue. In the end, like Alice afore, Coraline will be the one to tell the story. Apparently, the boy, Wyborne, isn't in the literary source, which really does raise the question: Why was he born? And, of course, the entire narrative otherwise is entangled within a web of dreams, with the other world being a looking-glass version of the one outside the door. The snow globes, dolls and button-eyed doppelgängers further add to this reflexivity.
There's some clever self-reference here, too, with the puppetry and doll making to the movie's stop-motion animation. Also notice the focus on the (surrogate animator's) hand in two sequences. Besides, more so than traditional or CGI animation, stop-motion is a closer mirroring of our own world in some ways. It exists as a solid, three-dimensional body outside of the picture, with only the puppet masters responsible for its movement hidden by the illusion of motion pictures. It's a dreamworld where puppeteers play with dolls for us to see.
Coraline is Alice, then. She's guided by a black feline, as Alice was guided by the Cheshire Cat. The cats' disappearing acts, along with the talking, rather give this one away. A white mouse serves as the White Rabbit--leading Coraline through the rabbit hole behind a tiny locked door. The two burlesque actresses living beneath Coraline's family in their Victorian house have their similarities with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. And there's the circus performer Mr. Bobo living upstairs--"Bobo" as in "the Dodo," reportedly to be the caricature in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" of its author, whose stammer is said to have caused him to introduce himself as Charles "Dodo-Dodgson." Meanwhile, the surrogate authors within this story are occupied by Coraline's parents, although they only write for a gardening catalogue. In the end, like Alice afore, Coraline will be the one to tell the story. Apparently, the boy, Wyborne, isn't in the literary source, which really does raise the question: Why was he born? And, of course, the entire narrative otherwise is entangled within a web of dreams, with the other world being a looking-glass version of the one outside the door. The snow globes, dolls and button-eyed doppelgängers further add to this reflexivity.
There's some clever self-reference here, too, with the puppetry and doll making to the movie's stop-motion animation. Also notice the focus on the (surrogate animator's) hand in two sequences. Besides, more so than traditional or CGI animation, stop-motion is a closer mirroring of our own world in some ways. It exists as a solid, three-dimensional body outside of the picture, with only the puppet masters responsible for its movement hidden by the illusion of motion pictures. It's a dreamworld where puppeteers play with dolls for us to see.