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Coraline
The story is about an 11-year-old girl who has just moved to a new house with her parents, who have a peculiar lifestyle, much more liberal than the norm. Parents begin to slave over gardening activities and soon end up too busy to think about their daughter. Coraline. The girl, taking advantage of these moments of distraction, finds a door to enter another world, where her “other” parents give her a treatment and life with which she feels much more comfortable and loved, her “other” mother is especially fun. Sometime Coraline You must decide if your life will continue in this “other world” or in the real one, however you will realize that the price of your stay is very expensive, relationships are cruel in that world, it is curious that people have buttons instead of eyes. Coraline You mustn’t let your royal eyes be fooled by the promise of a bright, idyllic life in button-eyed land.
«You probably think that this other world is a dream come true. But you’re wrong,” the cat warns Coraline.
Neil Gaiman’s other mother
Coraline It’s a brilliantly creepy story for both kids and adults alike, although according to Gaiman, it’s the adults who find it scariest. In his novel, the author also painted a portrait of how monstrous it can be to evade reality. The film is very close to the novel, however Neil Gaiman He has assured on several occasions that he was based on a popular legend from his native Hampshire, United Kingdom.
The story is about an old woman who was taking care of her newborn and orphaned granddaughter, since her parents had died in a fire. The old woman protected the girl for fear of losing her, to the point that her neighbors had never seen the girl come out to play with her. The old woman began to raise suspicions due to her radical upbringing and several children organized to enter the mansion one night and meet the mysterious girl. However, the boys were very upset, as they did not see any signs of children in the house, they only saw a crib. As they approached her, they discovered to their horror that there was a burned corpse of a baby with buttons sewn into her eye sockets. They quickly concluded that she had not survived the fire either, however, her grandmother was clinging to her body in complete dementia. After telling her parents, they ordered the old woman to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. The old woman wanted to take a doll to the hospital, claiming that the soul of her granddaughter lived in it.
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Coraline and the secret door, the true story.
The new mother
The Other Mother was partially inspired by The New Mother, a strange story by Victorian author Lucy Clifford. Clifford’s tale has been retold in folklore collections such as The Pear Drum, and was renamed “The Drum” by Alvin Schwartz in his book, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
The original story follows the lives of two sisters, Blue-Eyes and Turkey. One day while out, the sisters meet a strange girl with an even stranger instrument. She calls it “peardrum” and says there is a little man and a little woman inside. If she plays the drum, they go out and dance, and the woman tells a secret. The sisters want to see the little ones dance, but the girl says that she only shows them to them. So the sisters went home with their mother and her little brother, but they wanted to see the little show so much that they began to misbehave. The mother threatens them and warns them that if they continue with these behaviors she will leave them and send a mother to the house, with glass eyes and a wooden tail.
The sisters are shocked, but they are also sure that their mother is exaggerating, so they go to see the strange girl and her peardrum. The girl confirms that there is no mother with those characteristics. So Blue-Eyes and Turkey decide to misbehave; They break all their cups and throw the bread and butter on the floor. Her mother becomes distraught and punishes them. When they return to the strange girl the next day, she asks for even more transgressive behavior, so the girls return home to do more damage, Schwartz says they beat their little brother with a stick, and eventually their mother leaves them. So they go back to the peardrum girl one last time and she claims they haven’t been naughty enough yet. The sisters are left alone in their empty house. They wait and wait, but her mother does not return. In her place comes one, in Clifford’s story, the “new mother” breaks down the door and the girls flee out the back of their cabin, into the darkness of the forest, where they still live to this day hiding from their “ another” mother.
The three stories converge in that the “new” and the “other” mothers are entities, the children cannot trust them, because although she is almost their mother, but not completely. She is almost entirely human, and yet she is not.
Fortunately in Coraline, the protagonist finds a way to escape to the “other” mother, whereas in her previous versions, the girls were trapped forever in the other terrifying reality.