Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
âIt was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. Itâs the strangest book Iâve writtenâ
-Neil Gaiman on Coraline
@nightlovechild
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like thereâs a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. Itâs like in that âtoy storyâ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when theyâre not looking and that theyâre sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like âAh, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.â
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules thatâs like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up itâs apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. Iâve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in âCoralineâ adults see a child in danger - while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
Also, in an interview, he said that Coraline was partially based on a story his not yet 6 year old daughter would tell himÂ
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel âCoralineâ is about a young girl in house in which thereâs a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldnât be a brick wall. So Iâd sidle over to the door and Iâd pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. Sheâd come home from nursery. Sheâd seen me writing all day. So sheâd come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And itâd always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and sheâd have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
âFairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.â - G. K. Chesterton
Being a child is fucking horrifying: 2/10 would not do again.
