Coraline Gift Set [Blu-ray] Reviews

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fnoo Depends.

Gaiman has a great authorial voice. Nice economy of words, and his prose flows. He has absolutely no grasp of structure, though, and tends more toward pastiche than authentic individual expression.

Coraline feels like it was tailor made to appeal to the media fetishes of a certain demographic. And that's fine. It's just that when you strip away the surface affectations, there's not much actual story or character, and what's there is mostly borrowed.

fnoo There's plenty to defend, if one wishes to make a case. It's just, that's my problem with Gaiman in a nutshell: that he presents his affectations as if they should speak for themselves. Hey, look, he says. It's got these ingredients that you know you love. What more do you want?

alexxx187 Awesome movie. One of the best films of last year. I much preferred it to 'Up' which seemed to be the animated favorite last year.

amyuhrich Great animated film, in my opinion (though perhaps not entirely child-friendly - depends). Very entertaining and well-done for what it is. @fnoo But I can see why you think that about the film (as for Gaiman in general, I couldn't say).

fnoo American Gods has a similar thing going on. From beat to beat, the prose is beauiful. The premise is interesting. The characters have potential. And then the book meanders for hundreds of pages without actually doing anything with that material.

fnoo It's as if the fact of the premise is enough to justify the book, or that the fact of the details that he includes justifies their inclusion. It's a collection of things that are self-evidently cool, and therefore is itself cool for having collected them. It's fetishistic and vapid.

That's pretty much what I get from everything Gaiman writes.