Coraline is based on the 2002 story by Neil Gaiman, and is a delightfully weird take on the familiar child on a good versus evil quest in another world. Originally set in England, the film version predictably decamps to the US, where our blue-haired heroine (voiced by Dakota Fanning) moves with her parents to the crumbling Pink Palace Apartments, a building they share with a variety of deranged residents. There are retired thesps, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (voiced by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders), a strange young man named Wybie Lovat and his stray cat, and Mr. Bobinsky, the Russian gymnast dedicated to training his team of circus mice. But these eccentrics fail to amuse our child, and, encouraged by her distracted parents to explore the house, she finds a hidden door leading to another, better version of the building and her own life. Instead of seed-catalogue writing parents with limited culinary skills (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), she gets the undivided attention of her “Other Parents,” whose lives now revolve around pleasing their daughter in a now-gleaming Pink Palace building…but where everyone has buttons for eyes.
Just as in the Chronicles of Narnia, she is lured in by the good food and presents, before being told that all she has to do to remain there forever is to sew buttons over her eyes. A smite hesitant, the perfect world quickly unravels and the Other Mother then transforms into a terrifyingly angular witch and locks Coraline in a room, haunted by the ghosts of the Other Mother’s previous victims. Though Coraline escapes, her real parents are kidnapped as punishment, leaving her with no option but to return to the Other World and pit her wits against the Other Mother to get them back.
Coraline has already joined the league of superior animated films, which is no surprise given that it was directed by Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach, The Nightmare Before Christmas). You’re in for a visual treat if you catch it in either 2 or 3D. In the tradition of the best children-on-quest stories, Coraline starts out as a whingeing little madam, but turns her moods into feistiness to win back her Real Parents.
There are the usual amusing whimsical touches in the “normal” characters movements and homes, but the film comes into its own when the world of the Other Mother and the animation itself literally unravels, and when the weirdness of the Other World is looked at. Theatres full of applauding Scotch Terriers, semi-naked old women performing risqué songs, mice with buttons for eyes…..its all mad. But if you enjoyed things like The Corpse Bride and similar Tim Burton-esque stuff, then you’ll like this.

Jennifer Thompson