Coraline (NOT Caroline!)

I am a pretty mellow person, so I have only a few, quite reasonable pet peeves. One is scraping an iron frying pan, another is erasing a white board and leaving residue behind, and another is folding books into insane contortions that, as you read, leave personal creases and dog ears. Like I said, run of the mill annoyances.
There is one elusive idiosyncrasy that, before now, I did not realize I possessed. Why has it incubated for so long? Because I had never seen it done before. Now, thanks to Focus Features, it has been done to one of my favorite books, Coraline by Neil Gaiman. What have they done, you ask? They have....gasp...altered the tone of my story completely to reach a larger audience.
Okay, so maybe that is not the worst thing they could have done to the book. I think the character of Wybie Lovat might take that prize. But nevertheless...Every trailer I have seen has transformed this chilling, gothic story into James and the Giant Peach meets Alice and Wonderland. Hold on, James and the Giant Peach was scary. And if you don't believe me, you try watching the shark scene alone in the dark.
But maybe I'm being too harsh to the film. Maybe I can attribute my annoyance to false advertising, incredibly false advertising, and I will be properly horrified in the theater. I will certainly give the movie a chance to redeem itself. Neil Gaiman deserves this. And if the movie is good, I'll give him AND Focus Features praise for respecting a classic story. And if not...well, I'll just tell myself that I'm not watching Coraline but Caroline, a fun story about a girl with spunk and a magical, harmless, completely unscary world. Nothing wrong with that. I'll just discreetly leave and head to the right theater, the one that is showing the movie I really paid to see...wait, that was it?!