notdoingmywork asked: What was the point of the story Coraline? Because the first time I ever saw it, it was a DVD birthday gift from my mother, given with the description, "I saw this movie and thought of you, because the little girl in the movie is an ungrateful daughter like you are." I haven't been able to watch it more than once since then, and I keep finding mixed interpretations...
The point of it was to write a story for my daughters to tell them that being brave didn’t mean that you weren’t scared, it meant that you were scared but you did the right thing anyway; that people who give you lots of attention sometimes do not have your best interests at heart while people who give you less attention than you would like may still love you; that it is a good thing to save your family from the darkness, and that you have to forgive your dad if he’s writing things and can’t always stop to play with you.
I’ve not noticed any ungrateful daughters either in the book or in the film. I suspect your mother may be inclined to see them where they do not exist.
Chicago Humanities Festival, I think, in around 2002. I read all of Coraline in public, from start to finish, for the third and last time. It’s about 3 and a half hours, all in all. I am so happy there were people there who grew up and remember it…
Other Mother by knatroka on DeviantArt
And I also love that, in the last 5 hours, 9,500 people liked or loved this post. Here’s to a world in which we can all be our favourite characters when we dress up, just as we can be in our heads, when we read…
“Black is traditional.”
The Other Mother - Coraline
Hey, remember that makeup thing I used to do?
Me neither.
I wanted to do something to celebrate the beginning of October! So here’s a transformation from Coraline’s mother, to the Other Mother, to the cracking Beldam.
“They say even the proudest spirit can be broken… with love.”
Coraline - Romania
Fucking incredible Other Mother from Coraline cosplay by Miss Trisi. Find her on tumblr here.
via NTTDS
argh.
― Neil Gaiman (via projectunbreakable)
Which I’m reblogging because I’ve been following Project Unbreakable about as long as I’ve been on Tumblr. It’s really hard and painful, and at the same time it’s always uplifting to see people stand up talk about their histories of sexual assault, rape and damage, and see them make the decision not to be victims, or to let what happened to them define them.
(Do I need to say that not everyone is at the point those people have reached, and that how we deal with what happened to us isn’t something that anyone else gets to tell us? Probably I do.)
It wasn’t until last year’s Ocean at the End of the Lane tour that I realised how many people had used Coraline to get through dark, hard times. So seeing a quote from Coraline from Project Unbreakable meant a lot to me.
Today is the first day of Banned Books Week, a week that draws critical attention to book censorship in schools and libraries across the country. Sadly enough, Banned Books Week is celebrating its …“When I first picked up Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) in the Young Adult section of my local library, I remember thinking to myself, “This will be a very frightening book.” This thought excited me, as it often does around that teen-age when you begin to actively seek out the things that frighten you. Coraline seemed to me a darker retelling of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with the perfect balance of whimsy and darkness only Gaiman can execute so effortlessly. I have never thought of Coraline as a young-adult novel, because Coraline, like so many of her YA protagonist counterparts, must face challenges that would defeat most adults. Though she is a young child, Coraline is far more mature and self-aware than most of the adults in the novel, and yet she’s still able to bring joy and silliness to the most horrifying of situations. Within the twisted, fantastical world of the Other Mother, Coraline is given the option of remaining within the dreamscape, constantly refabricated to suit Coraline’s desires and dreams—she can remain, as it were, in the rabbit hole. At a price, that is. Yet Coraline chooses not to be blinded by her own selfish desires, no matter how fluorescent and enamoring they may be. She cares too deeply about her parents, and the other children that have been exploited by the Other Mother, and her friend the Cat. She even possesses sympathy for the Other Father, an amorphous phantasm of her father the Other Mother discards once he’s served his purpose. At the climax of the story, when Coraline has the option to end the nightmarish pursuit of the Other Mother and give into the fantasy, Coraline sagely remarks, “‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted, just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?’” (Gaiman 2002). It’s a simple sentiment the book slowly builds around, one that resonates with life-long ethics of gratitude, hard work and not expecting that the world necessarily owes you something.
Dave McKean’s Other Mother:http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120809202452/villains/images/c/c2/Dave-mckean-coraline-the-other-mother.jpg
Coraline also has one of the most profound passages about bravery that I’ve ever read. She tells the Cat a story about when she and her father went exploring in an old rubbish dump and accidentally stumble across a wasp’s nest. Coraline’s father scoops her up and carries her to safety, though he gets stung by many wasps in the process. During the escape, her father loses his glasses and has to return to the wasp’s nest to retrieve them. Coraline says, “’It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.’ ‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave” (Gaiman 2002). Being fearless doesn’t make you brave, but rather acknowledging the fear and not letting it own you demonstrates courage. As a reader, the novel is truly terrifying, for the trials that Coraline has to undergo are the stuff of nightmares. Even after it seems that Coraline has escaped the clutches of the Other Mother and saved the souls of the forgotten children, she is still called upon to be brave, though no one within her own world understands or acknowledges her courage. The invisible acts of bravery and charity our lives are built around.
Coraline remains one of my favorite books, enduring for its charm, sly sense of humor and candor about the night-side of life. The frightening elements of Coraline are what make it so mesmerizing, as they teach us how misunderstood the darkness truly is and how much we can cope with and overcome. As Gaiman prefaces the book, dragons, darkness, violence and fear are all very real and necessary parts of our world, whether adult or otherwise. But dragons can also be vanquished, doors closed on the scuttling, malicious things that populate our nightmares and waking reality. That is a lesson worth learning, and one I continue to learn every day since I first finished the book.”
