Coraline (animation)/Headscratchers

• From The Film of the Book: Wybie mentions that his grandmother doesn't rent to families with children--she seems to realize something in the house preys on children, including her long-gone sister. It's never explained why Coraline's family is an exception, or why she doesn't intervene once she's realized (because of the missing doll) that Coraline's in danger.
  • I always construed that as the landlord not wanting to deal with certain liabilities from having kids running around. #1 is the presence of a poorly-protected well. It doesn't appear that grandmother knew the doll had anything to do with her sister's disappearance.
  • Easy. Does it appear that the grandmother has even met Coraline? Or that her parents actually told the Grandmother that they have a kid after finding a big "No kids"?
  • It is never a good idea to turn down tenants in a recession.
  • Or, of course, her parents could have simply "forgotten to mention" they had a daughter. The place being simply too good a deal to miss out on.
    • Considering how little attention they pay to Coraline at the start of the film, that makes sense.
  • This troper assumes that the grandmother knew exactly, or at least had a good understanding of, the disappearance of her twin sister. Somehow, the grandmother also learned of the use of the doll, which spy on the Other Mother's newest victim. Therefore, she allowed Coraline and her family to move in when the doll was safely in the trunk back at home, thus, the Other Mother could not spy on Coraline and create a world around her. If only Wybie had simply let the doll be...
  • Better yet, why didn't she do anything to destroy the key? If she knew that it opened the only way into the Other Mother's clutches, why did she leave it in plain reach of anyone who went in the house? She may have been deathly afraid of entering the house after what happened to her sister, but that was when they were kids (at least 50 years back), she had all the chance in the world to walk in and get rid of it in the conveniently nearby well, but she instead left it in the key drawer. She clearly didn't expect a cleverer kid like Coraline to come and outwit the Other Mother as proven by the "No Kids" policy, so there's no real excuse for this.
    • Perhaps she didn't realize the key was in the drawer? She did lock the door and wallpaper over it, so throwing away the key seems like the next logical step. Maybe she just accidentally threw away the wrong key. Or, even if she did get rid of it, it has a way of eventually finding its way back to the door, the same way circumstances conspired to deliver the re-sewn doll to Coraline.
      • If that's the case, then how can we be sure that throwing it away in the well at the end of the film would have stopped it coming back?
        • I like to pin my hopes on what the Other Mother screamed as she was trying to beat her way through the door near the end: "I'll die without you!" Wybie's grandmother locked the door and kept the Other Mother from getting any more children for decades. Maybe she was already nearly starved to death by the present day; that might be why the Other World started winding down so quickly, and why she was so impatient for Coraline to join them. The Other Mother used the last of her strength to try to get Coraline: when Coraline defeated her and relocked the door, the Other Mother was doomed.
  • Maybe she hoped one day she could find a way to bring her sister back, which Coraline did. Hence she left the key where it could be found.

• So in the movie version (still haven't read the book), Coraline seems completely unfazed when she realizes she's discovered an alternate universe where her parents have buttons where their eyes should be. Any sane person would be freaked out, at least initially. I know she "thinks she's dreaming", but you don't react to stuff like that when you really are dreaming.
  • Unfazed? Re-watch the scene where she first meets Other Mother, she gasps and takes a step back, saying "You're not my mom!" in a pretty freaked out tone. She must have thought it was a dream (the blossoming mice, button eyes, dad's musical number) and played along. It's worth noting she's pretty freaked out in that first visit because of the insta-rain and thunder Other Mother calls down. Even still, the assumption it's not a real place lasts her approximately three more visits and a lot of frustration at home before she starts seeing not just as real, but preferring the Other Mother's world to her own (and she's still suitably horrified when told she needs to get button eyes to live there full time).
  • I usually figure out that I'm dreaming when something really weird happens in a dream.
    • Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's not until we wake up that we realize something was off.
    • Not everybody is capable of that. Most people, while dreaming, have trouble noticing the flaws in dream-logic, and just kind of go with the flow.
  • Coraline actually has less of an instinctive reaction to the Other Mother's button eyes in the book, where she doesn't even make a comment about the button eyes. The only way to explain this is that she really thought she was dreaming and was acting much like Alice did in Wonderland. I actually prefer the movie's depiction of the other world to the book's, as it's more plausible that Coraline would want to stay there with all the wonderful things going on and only a hint here and there as to the Other Mother's true intentions until The Reveal, than in the book where the inherent creepiness and wrongness of the other world is much more apparent (the rats' song alone should be enough of a warning bell to anyone).
    • Having read the book I felt as if the whole thing was written in the style of a fairytale. fairytales, to the best of my awareness have this certain... way of being written, where strange things like little girls being eaten by wolves or old women being killed for their Tinderboxes, being described in a somewhat matter-of-fact tone. Thats the way Coraline the book felt to me when I was reading it. It made the whole thing a little more creepy.

• Why bother changing "find the ghost-children's souls" to "find their eyes" for the movie? The fact that there was still only one of each and they didn't exactly look like eyes(except for being spherical) just gets me - what was the point of changing just what they were called?
  • For Symbolism, in the Other World, you lose your real eyes when you don the buttons. It can also mean that, since "the eyes are the window of the soul", when you are wearing those buttons your soul is missing or trapped, and the ghosts needed those eyes to become free.
  • I always assumed it was because the subject of souls can be a sensitive one, and the writers might have been worried about Moral Guardians getting upset at the idea of children missing their souls. Although talking about souls doesn't really seem all that serious in light of the rest of the movie, you have to keep in mind that people will get up in arms about really abstract/minor things at times.
    • That really can't be the case. In the movie the ghosts explicitly say: "Find our eyes and then our souls will be free". Clearly they didn't fear to reference to souls directly.

• Just a minor one, but with the attitude Coraline's parents seem to have toward her doing/wearing anything too unusual, why would they let her dye her hair blue?
  • Their attitude can also be described as one of benign parental negligence, so it's not too implausible.
  • It's possible that they didn't so much care about what she did with her hair or what she wore, but the gloves weren't necessary and they were under some financial pressure (as stated above), so they couldn't afford any indulgences at the time (note that the gloves were purchased once the pressure was off). As for what she was doing, again, they were stressed and under a lot of pressure at the time, so of course they'd want her to behave herself for a while.
    • Adding onto the glove/financial situation thing, did anyone else notice how much the gloves were? If I remember right, they were around $26.99! Even if the family weren't struggling financially, that'd be a ridiculous expense.
  • I know it sounds stupid, but I figured it was just her natural hair colour.