And Now What?: Coraline

It’s time now for the first ever weekend blog series here. The theme for this bunch of posts will be an exploration of creators struggling to maintain their spark after the onset of success and fame. What do you do when the story you set out to tell is told? Where do you go from there? The title of the series is “And Now What?”

First off, a discussion of a film I watched yesterday, Coraline. Henry Selick, the director of this film, is perhaps the least celebrated director of beloved movies out there. He directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the film’s success is attributed to Tim Burton, similarly, Coraline is attributed to Neil Gaiman, whose aesthetic and thematic concerns overwhelm the contributions that Selick brings to the film.

I read Coraline the book a while back, and wasn’t particularly impressed, but seeing the film, particularly after seeing the Gaiman scripted Mirrormask makes it clear that Neil has been on a lengthy cold/lazy streak when it comes to making works that capture the zeitgeist, or at least works that really grab me.

My first time through Sandman, I was absolutely dazzled by what Gaiman was doing. I still think that Sandman is the best comic not written by Morrison or Moore, and is probably more significant to the industry as a whole than any comic that Morrison has written. Sandman was a huge step towards making comics cool in some circles, and of intellectual interest in others. Sandman was the point where the very strong and esoteric work being done within the DCU branched out into the creator owned work that would follow. Vertigo is the HBO of comics, the site of many of the significant works of the past fifteen years, and it exists mostly because of Sandman.

Strangely enough, Neil at this point reminds me a lot of Garth Ennis. Both Ennis and Gaiman wrote a series so perfectly representative of all the themes and character types that engage them that reading anything new they put out feels essentially superfluous. For Ennis, that series was Preacher, for Gaiman, it’s obviously Sandman. Sandman is overflowing with stories, each single issue story brought us into a different world, and built on the overall mythos of the Dreaming. And, the longer stories built nicely on each other, creating a larger meta-narrative out of many little stories.

But, because Sandman is so well done, it can be hard to read anything else Neil has done and find that same fresh innovation. Mirrormask is a riff on the Game of You story from Sandman, and then Coraline is a virtual remake of Mirrormask. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, it’s just doing the exact same thing I’ve already seen in several other Gaiman stories. Similarly, the god and human interaction in the Eternals or American Gods retread much of the same material covered in Sandman.

I think creators have a right to do the same thing again and again. We’re all drawn to certain types of material, but the trick is making it feel fresh. Wong Kar-Wai’s movies frequently have a similar tone, but by switching from the frenetic visuals of Fallen Angels to the more classical approach of In the Mood for Love, he keeps things fresh. Heat and Public Enemies are extremely similar on a narrative level, but the differences in visual approach and tone make each film feel fresh and unique.

In the case of Gaiman’s work, the central issue is that post Sandman, he’s settled into a really twee tone in virtually all of his work. There’s a lot of dark elements in Coraline, but the overall takeaway is that mix of goth and cutesy that worked fine in the character of Delirium or Death in Sandman, but has gotten a bit old by this point.

To that end, it feels like Gaiman has lost some of the edgier aspects of his work, something that’s a common problem in older creators. Gaiman has carved out an audience who love the stuff he does, they love the subject matter and they love the tone. To go back and do something like the diner short story from the early days of Sandman would be quite jarring. And, without the ongoing format of Sandman to explore, it’s easy to initiate project after project that hits the same emotional beats. Mirrormask is the same story as Coraline in so many ways, and for someone with so many stories, it’s depressing to see that.

That kind of softening is a classic path for older directors and actors. Gaiman has kids, and he probably wants to tell stories they’d like, not things they couldn’t read. But, for the general reader, nothing since Sandman has had the urgency and intensity of Neil at his best.

But, perhaps I’m more a fan of Sandman specifically than Neil’s work in general. Certainly I don’t think any of his prose work comes close to the best of Sandman, or even the early DC works collected in a Gaiman centric trade by DC. Other than Sandman, my favorite Gaiman stuff is his work on Miracleman, which managed to expand on what Alan Moore did without just emulating it. I’ve only read the issues collected in The Golden Age, but they all were drastically different from each other, and different from most other Gaiman works.

So, the possible resumption of that run has me pretty excited. Working in the Miracleman universe will force Gaiman to cut down on some of his easy go to stories, and do something a bit different. That said, it’s going to be interesting to see him pick up a story fifteen years after publication was halted. As we’ve seen with The Godfather Part III or The Phantom Menace, most people usually aren’t satisfied when a beloved series returns after a fifteen year hiatus. However, this might be more analogous to something like Brian Wilson’s Smile album, a modern recreation of what would have been.

But, Coraline to me felt pretty creatively bankrupt. It’s a story I’ve seen before, done better in Mirrormask, and it brought up a lot of my own mixed feelings about Gaiman’s recent output. He’s a great storyteller, but I’d like to see him get out of his comfort zone and do something that isn’t all about that sense of whimsy, and hits a bit harder on an emotional level. Coraline is Gaiman’s equivalent of Ennis writing a comic about an Irish guy who likes to drink and has issues with religion.