Coraline (PG)

A STORY told using stop motion animation with a young girl as the heroine – you could be excused for thinking this is a children’s film. It is, but with more than a touch of the nightmares about it, perhaps to be expected from writerdirector Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas.

There are traces of Alice In Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales with some Roald Dahl thrown in for good ghoulish measure in a positively bizarre story.

Children at the screening I attended sat through it quietly, possibly too scared to move as young Coraline resists having her eyes replaced by buttons in order to live in perfect alternative world. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a few adults running screaming from the cinema while their offspring take it all in their innocent stride.

Based on a Neil Gaiman book (so you know where the fantastical elements come from) Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a little girl who’s missing the friends she left behind when the family moved home.

Her parents (Desperate Housewife Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) leave her to her own devices, which accounts for her following a performing mouse through a secret door in the wall to another world.

There she finds her Other Mother and Other Father have much more time for her. But this comes at a price as the Other Mother wants to sew buttons where Coraline’s eyes are before she’ll let her stay.

She already has a collection of eyes of children who’ve met a fate worse than being in a cute Disney cartoon.

This is all very Alice-like, what with unfriendly insects, a praying mantis tractor and a pair of English actresses (French and Saunders) given to doing embarrassing variety turns.

Where Coraline really scores is in the stop motion animation. It looks a treat, full of visual tricks and treats.

And the 3D version – being shown in selected cinemas – is startlingly spectacular. Seek it out if you can.