PG • 101 mins • 8 May

Director: Henry Selick

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Ian McShane, Keith David

Rating:

Koumpounophobia. You probably haven’t heard of it before, but after watching Coraline you may well become afflicted. Never before have buttons been quite so creepy. But there’s much more to this adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book than exploiting fears of fabric fastenings. The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick uses the source material to redefine what stop-motion animation can do, creating a fairytale in turns scary, sweet and sometimes just plain odd.

As 11-year-old Coraline Jones (Fanning) ventures into a magical alternative dimension – everything’s the same except for the talking cat spirit guide, her ultra-friendly “Other” parents and the fact that everyone has freaky buttons for eyes – it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect marriage of medium and subject matter. Since Corpse Bride, stop-motion technology has moved on so much that it’s virtually impossible to tell it apart from CG. The model work here is so minutely detailed and ingeniously crafted that you can barely believe it ever existed for real. Indeed, the knowledge that every set was built, every piece of clothing sewn and every facial expression moulded makes it worth that little bit extra – particularly when you see it in 3D which, for once, actually works.

The animation segues seamlessly from a surprisingly real “real” world – it feels like ours in miniature, even down to the perfectly realised Volkswagen Beetle on the driveway – to the twisted domain of the Cruella De Vil-like Other Mother (Hatcher), a fantasy playground that soon turns into something from the cheese-induced nightmares Tim Burton might have after watching Naked Lunch.

In fact, there’s so much to love about Coraline that it leaves you wondering why it’s not the masterpiece it often threatens to be. Perhaps it’s that the slight story feels stretched to fill 100 minutes. Or that the opening act takes way too long to establish the real world before taking a detour into the considerably more enticing alternative. Still, if you’re going to make a movie that doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, you might as well make sure those parts are beautifully formed.

Richard Edwards