Coraline is an amazing film and a eye-popping visual spectacle. But it was not these aspects that held me rapt in the theater when I watched it. The same emotions the film evoked in me were the same as those I had not felt in over a decade. Fans of LucasFilm Games will resonate with this thought, that experiencing (not just watching) Coraline was akin to my first foray into classic adventure games.
Games like Loom, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Zak McKracken, just to name a select few, cultivated my imagination and my senses as a young gamer. And while one could argue that point-and-click adventure games may be the most passive of all gaming genres, this allowed room for the game developers to prioritize specific game elements, most notably storytelling and art design. As gaming worlds began to expand into three dimensions, with that came the ability to get a close-up look at ugly textures and odd model clipping. But the graphic adventure games came to life atop painstakingly detailed environments, and the characters, while powered only by a finite set of emotive sprites, had a wider range of emotion than many of today's gaming greats.
Maybe Dom (right) just has more trouble expressing his feelings as well as Bernard (middle) and Other Father (left).
Being at the pinnacle of decades of stop-motion film making, Coraline still "suffered" from the typical artifacts of the medium. The frame-rate was just smooth enough that you wouldn't notice the hand-posed key frames the unless you trained your eye to notice it, but it was most assuredly there. It was most evident during the spectacular mouse circus scene, but the director himself said he chose not use CGI for the scene preserve that feel of stop-motion, a choice that made watching the film that much more memorable. And with adventure games, the method of animation was essentially the same. Capture the character in a few select poses, and squeeze as much emotion possible out of each and every frame. And rather than teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, graphic adventures ran with the idea that we as an audience would be able to better identify with the heroes if they looked nothing like we did.
But even more breathtaking than the animation itself were the environments. It was difficult to fathom that everything was hand-crafted when scenes like the garden tour and the climactic "boss battle" pushed the envelope into dream-like territory. And while it the artistic investment into the environments of Coraline reminded me of such locales as Melee Island, Rubacava, or the sunken city of Atlantis (Indiana Jones verison), it wasn't necessarily the sweeping nature of the settings that really hit me. While the narrative meandered along, we kept revisiting the same places over and over again. But given the parallel-world nature of the story, each place had different versions of itself, be it the drab and dusty real world versions, or their colorful and spatial-logic-defying fantasy counterparts. While this might immediately remind you of the common light-dark theme we've seen in a number of non-adventure games (i.e. Link to the Past), it instead reminded me of Dr. Fred Edison's Mansion from Day of the Tentacle, and how while we never left the mansion itself, Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne explored a world within a world with pockets of its own alternate dimensions. Likewise, in the film everything revolved around the Pink Palace. Not only did Coraline explore every nook and cranny in and around the house, but she returned to the same locations again and again, fantasy world and not, when she had new insights or questions regarding her current situation. Being that the story rarely left the house in the film, there was definitely a slight sense of "being on a budget" when it came to locations, but you wouldn't know it from seeing how far they stretched the sequences in the garden, circus, or theater.
Coraline, SCUMM-style.
(minor spoilers ahead) But with as much as there is to say about story and art design, a game isn't a game without gameplay, in the case of the film, the clincher was in Coraline's very own adventure. Glimpses of inventory management and puzzle solving hearkened back to that frame of mind I adopted when playing the classics. Elements like laying out the cheese for the button-mice, stacking the books to retrieve the key, the flashlight and the dog-bats, packing the garden shears for a purpose only to be realized later, and ultimately the final-level-like quality of the quest for the three hidden eyes, to be discovered with only the help of that trinket you received from your sagely allies, all added to the warm fuzzy feeling of being back in front of my old 386 with floppies in hand. And the quick thinking and resourcefulness Coraline demonstrated during the aforementioned "boss battle" was definitely more reminiscent of an ending sequence in an adventure game, light years more so than the typical boss fight that would be dependent on remembering a jumping pattern or shaving pixels off an elongated health bar.
To my disappointment, I found out that Coraline got the typical kids movie video game treatment, as a minigame-platformer for the Wii/PS2/DS. I would like to think that had adventure games continued to develop to the present day beyond their premature demise in the late 90's, they might have looked something like Coraline.
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