Coraline (2009) on Netflix

PG20091h 40mAnimation Family Fantasy Horror

Coraline Jones, eleven, moves into the Pink Palace Apartments with her parents. Behind a small door, a tunnel leads to an Other World and button-eyed doubles of her mother and father.

Netflix4.2/5
IMDb7.8/10306,150 votes
Rotten Tomatoes91%

Trailer

Plot summary

Coraline Jones is eleven when she and her mother and father leave Pontiac, Michigan, for the Pink Palace Apartments, a Victorian house in Ashland, Oregon. Her parents stay busy with work, so she explores alone. She meets the landlady's grandson, Wybie Lovat, who hands her a rag doll made to look like her, and a black cat. A small door in the living room has a brick wall behind it; that night the wall becomes a tunnel into an Other World, where button-eyed doubles of her parents feed her and give her their attention. Her neighbors, Sergei Alexander Bobinsky, who keeps a mouse circus, and the retired actresses April Spink and Miriam Forcible, warn her of danger. The Other Mother offers Coraline a home there forever, if she lets buttons be sewn over her eyes.

Cast

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Coraline (2009)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for Coraline's puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair; a single garment could take from six weeks to six months to complete.
Director Henry Selick wanted to leave the seams in the puppets' faces to show they were handmade, but Laika owner Phil Knight requested that the seams be removed digitally.
They Might Be Giants were hired to compose an entire soundtrack for Coraline, but according to John Flansburgh the production team "wanted the music to be more creepy", and only one song was ultimately used.
The production made 28 identical puppets of Coraline; each one took three to four months to build and usually took about ten people to construct.
Coraline's puppets had separate upper and lower head parts that could be swapped to give different facial expressions, letting the characters display over 208,000 of them.
Because Henry Selick thought a direct adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novella would make "maybe a 47-minute movie", he expanded his screenplay, adding Wybie, who is only mentioned in the book.
Coraline's 2024 3D 15th-anniversary re-release grossed $29.2 million worldwide by August 23, making it the highest-grossing re-release in the history of Fathom Events.