Contemporary Urban Fantasy

For this weeks reading, I dove into the world of Coraline, Gaiman's short fantastical novel. Within this story Gaiman explores major elements revolving around dreams and dream sequences, a theme commonly found in mythic reading. Majorly, there is the portal which transports Coraline into the world of "dreams" where she finds other personas of her family and friends around her.
A very prominent and important character that follows Coraline along her journey and aids in assistance in her understanding, is her feline friend, the cat. This character archetype is seen many times before, one example being C.S. Lewis's cheshire cat. Which also derives from mythological animal characters, helping the protagonist in their journey or battle.
Of course, the other mother is a very iconic mythic and fairytale archetype seen as the step mother. At first appealing as an even better version of Coraline's mother, but soon is revealed to be an evil entity trying to posses Coraline's soul.
Gaiman took these aspects of myths, along with some other minute ones hidden, and put them into our contemporary world in a way young audiences could identify and digest them. In doing this, Gaiman creates a new style of the myths in modern terms, ones that shine a light on more modern ideas such as a powerful young female lead as Coraline.

Comments

  1. Katey StareNovember 6, 2019 at 2:08 PM

    Nice blog post! You made some excellent points on the meanings behind the story that I've never thought of.

    ReplyDelete

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