Cat Saves the Day

After napping after Reds, I watched Coraline while I ate chicken noodle soup and waited to go to the radio station. I've listened to some audiobooks of Neil Gaiman's, and I heard the I think Terry Gross interview about this movie forever ago. I did see it in 3D but when I saw it on the library shelf, it appealed to me. I like the plastic doll feeling of the animation. I like all the yellow and blue. I like that a cat saves the day. I like the part where Coraline turns her pillows into parents when they're missing in the evil spider witch's web. I'm not sure exactly what the moral of the story is. Coraline gets mad that her parents are too busy working on a gardening catalog to pay attention to her, which is worse because they've all just moved to a new state and the creepy Pink Palace apartment building, but she has a nice Russian acrobat neighbor and some weird former-performer ladies who stuff their dead dogs and eat hand stretched taffy as other neighbors. So a kid gives her a doll that looks just like her, she finds a tiny door in the wall and when she goes through it she finds her life but better, like her parents on this side of the door fall all over her and make her cakes and mango milkshakes but they have buttons for eyes and eventually want to button her eyes as well. This is gruesome. I will not dwell on how gruesome it is. More and more she wants to be on the other side of the door, where things are nicer and more delicious. The cat is always like, kid, it's a trick, you know, but Coraline doesn't listen until it's too late. The cat is the one that helps her out of the jam when the spider lady traps her and then kidnaps her parents. The better life on the other side of the door was all a game to feed the spider lady, how scary! She gets out in the end and frees spirits and saves her parents and then is happy to be not trapped by the evil spider lady anymore. So is the point that good things are fake? Love your parents? Listen to cats?