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: Both are highly acclaimed for their unique animation styles and eerie, post-apocalyptic, or "other-worldly" atmospheres. Media Releases : You can find this pairing on DVD double-feature sets that bundle both movies together. Fan Comparison

The horror in Coraline does not begin in the Other World; it begins in the mundane, rain-soaked flat of the real one. Gaiman meticulously establishes an atmosphere of what might be termed “benign neglect.” Coraline’s parents, Mel and Charlie Jones, are work-from-home writers who are so absorbed in their horticultural catalogue that they consistently fail to provide the attention and engagement a young child craves. They feed her “boring” recipes, dismiss her complaints about the weather, and tell her not to be “a drama queen.” This is not abusive parenting, but it is absent parenting. The real world is a place of grey rain, old toys, and the irritatingly cryptic chatter of an elderly neighbor (Miss Spink and Miss Forcible) and a madman in the basement (Mr. Bobo). coraline 9

Her three forays into the Other World to retrieve the marbles constitute a bildungsroman of the will. Each trip requires her to outwit the increasingly desperate Other Mother, to resist the seductive transformations of the Other World (which gradually deteriorates into a formless white void), and to rely on her own memory and resourcefulness. Crucially, her weapons are not magical but psychological: a stone with a hole in it (a gift from her real-world neighbors, imbued with their eccentric but genuine protection), a black cat that belongs to no one and refuses all allegiances, and her own capacity for observation and logic. When she returns to the real world with the hands of the Other Mother mangled but still reaching, she completes her transformation. She has learned to see the danger in too-perfect love and to value the flawed, boring, but real attention of her parents, who have finally been shocked into awareness by her absence. : Both are highly acclaimed for their unique