Abstract

Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009) charts the exploits of an eleven-year-old girl as she discovers the secrets of her family’s new home. At its core, the film explores what family means, through issues of identity, belonging and the ‘othering’ of characters. Within Selick’s morose, colourless real world, Coraline struggles to establish herself as an individual, and is subsequently drawn to the witchy, shadowy side of home where her doppelgänger parents take more notice of her and encourage her feelings of self-fulfilment. Underpinning this story is the physical act of wandering that Coraline undertakes as she explores these vastly different representations of home and family. The portal/tunnel she crawls through is a corridor between the real and unreal, the mundane and fantastic, the invisible and vibrant. It links two distinctive worlds and simultaneously highlights their differences, asking where home actually lies. At the heart of this is the wandering child who searches for her own identity and the answer to a question: where exactly does she fit in, and is ‘home’ something to be sought after or something to dread?