I caught a bit of Come Dine With Me early in the evening.  It’s allegedly a reality show, in the form of a competition between five people to see who can entertain the others with their culinary skills the bestest.  This particular episode, there was a woman who was set on winning, determined to dazzle the others with her fabulous cooking and organic ingredients.

So, the guests arrived, and even before they got to eat were nonplussed by the sight and sound of their host’s fiance playing a flute to her dog.  Like you do.  And then, the first course arrived, an eggcup sized portion of what was described as Celebration Cous Cous with Quinoa.  For some reason, I don’t associate micrograins of pasta with any particular form of celebration, so that name, along with the tootling boyfriend, struck me as somewhat redundant and fanciful.

And, sad to say, that’s the feeling I get having seen Coraline too.  But, only on reflection and in considering other stories that author Neil Gaiman has come up with.  Considered purely on its own merits, Coraline is a treasure trove of amazing imagery, stopframe animation conjured into life by director and screenplay adaptor Henry Selick.  There’s a theatre full of Highland terriers, a Russian acrobat and his performing mice, a magical tunnel between this world and another, and a phantasmagoria of astonishing images kaleidoscoping across the screen, and indeed out of it if like me you see the 3D version.

The protagonist is a young girl called Coraline, who moves with her parents to a big old house in the middle of nowhere.  Coraline is pretty much left to her own devices as her parents are busy putting together a gardening catalogue — so busy that they never get any time for actual gardening themselves.  Her dad encourages Coraline to explore the house, which is how she comes across a hidden door that’s been wallpapered over, and turns out to connect their place to a nicer version the other side, where a button-eyed woman declares herself Coraline’s Other Mother.

Everything on the Other Mother’s side seems better than it does with Coraline’s actual parents, and that suggests there’s a catch somewhere.  Which there is.  Other Mother wants Coraline to stay with her and be loved.  There’s just the small matter of taking her eyes out and replacing them with buttons…

Anyone looking to do a PhD on film symbolism could have a field day with Coraline.  The film is saturated with fantastic imagery from start to finish, and it’s realised to perfection by a whole bunch of animators and artists.  What that imagery symbolises is another matter…not that every image needs ‘mean’ anything in particular.  But I get the sense that underneath that rich canopy of visual data, there’s — whisper it — not a whole lot going on.

Making such a claim risks infuriating Gaiman’s legion of fans.  But so be it.  And hear me out.  I very much enjoy some of Gaiman’s work, but Coraline is another example of something the author did more than a few times in the Sandman comic series that established his reputation.  That something is stories which involve characters collecting plot tokens, ie random but significant items which advance the narrative.  In this case the tokens are items which contain the souls of the Other Mother’s victims.  It’s a functional enough way of moving a story forward, but boils down to Pacman in another form.  And that’s a shame, because I’d love to see Gaiman develop his storytelling and structural muscles as much as he has his raw imagination.

Make no mistake: Coraline is well worth seeing.  It’s a visually beautiful film with real heart, and a superb score fusing harps, horns, and a choir to gorgeous effect.  Guaranteed, you won’t have come across anything like it before.  It’s just a shame that, having got all the balls up in the air so magnificently, that the magic ends in such a matter of fact way that’s more than familiar to fans of Gaiman’s work.