Film review: Coraline

Published on Thursday 7 May 2009 18:53

CORALINE (PG) **** DIRECTED BY: HENRY SELICK VOICES: DAKOTA FANNING, TERI HATCHER, JENNIFER SAUNDERS, DAWN FRENCH

IT'S not just the gothic visual style, off-kilter lullabies and characters with buttons for eyes that make this stop-motion 3D animation film – based on a 2002 book by Nail Gaiman – so enjoyably creepy.

Initially, the most unsettling thing about it his how quiet it all is. Compared to the average brash CG animated film, director Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach) doesn't overload proceedings with emotive music or chaotic scenery. As we're getting to know the bored, blue-haired, 11-year-old Coraline of the title (she's voiced by Dakota Fanning), we get a sense of how much her world has changed now that her work-obsessed journalist parents have moved her to a ramshackle old boarding house in the Oregon countryside. In short, she suddenly feels uneasy with no distractions, and so do we. Selick builds on this feeling as he takes us on a delightfully dark journey into a parallel world in which Coraline's parents are suddenly very attentive and our heroine's adolescent dissatisfaction with her life seems to melt away, until she realises there might be a catch to having her unspoken fantasies come true. It's weird and wonderful stuff, with Selick using the 3D sparingly to subtly add depth and texture to this magical, macabre world.