“Coraline,” a 2009 stop-motion film about a girl who discovers a creepy alternate world where everyone’s eyes have been replaced with buttons, has recently been remastered to a higher quality resolution. It earned around $4.91 million this past summer after a two-day re-release.
This created an uproar in the Coraline community, resulting in the creation of new theories around the film and the discovery of new easter eggs in various shots of the film. This was encouraged by Henry Selick, the director of the film, who made the point that everything in the film was intentional.
The film starts with a scene where the Other Mother, the main antagonist of the story, is preparing Coraline’s doll. In this scene, there are many references to preparing a dead body in a mortuary, insinuating that the Other Mother was preparing Coraline for her own funeral. For example, the “sewing” tools the Other Mother uses when constructing the doll are very similar to tools used in a mortuary in the 20s. Another example is the saw dust she uses to fill the doll as saw dust is usually used to fill corpses in preparation for a funeral.
The wallpaper in the room where the Other Mother constructs Coraline’s doll has a rather distinct pattern, depicting a cuckoo bird and its victim, a reed warbler. Cuckoo birds are known to impersonate a warbler’s offspring, slowly eliminating its “siblings” until the cuckoo bird is the only chick in the nest. This is seen in the Other Mother’s behavior when she tries to eliminate Coraline’s parents in order to make her stay in the Other World longer.
There are other ways in which Selick is able to sneak easter eggs into the film. The portal which Coraline uses throughout the whole film to travel between the normal world and the Other World appears to have articles of clothing scattered throughout the last time it is shown on screen. These articles of clothing can be traced back to the Other Mother’s previous victims including the boy in the painting above the fireplace.
The painting also has an interesting theory many Coraline fans have looked into. Fans suspect it to reference a painting called “The Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough as the two wear similar articles of clothing, both in the Victorian style. A different opinion is that it references a painting called “The Crying Boy,” this one believed to have a curse as the painting and its prints survived multiple house fires when other valuable possessions failed to.
Details in the film are still being brought up today by Coraline fans which reflects just how high Selick’s attention to detail was during the production of the film. These details are mere puzzle pieces, yet to be put together to uncover the movie’s secret meaning.
