(2009) Moving into the Pink Palace Apartments in rainy Oregon from Pontiac, Michigan, Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) with her parents, mother Mel (voiced by Terri Hatcher) - "Your dad cooks, I clean, and you stay out of the way" - and father Charlie (voiced by John Hodgman) - "Let me work" - who have little time for her while they compose on their computers a garden catalog (though they dislike dirt), have taken up residence in a very old building.

Their neighbors are an eccentric Russian circus acrobat, Sergei Alexander Bobinsky (voiced by Ian McShane), and a pair of old spinsters downstairs, the short and obese Miss April Spink (voiced by Jennifer Saunders) and the tall and buxom Miss Miriam Forcible (Dawn French) with their dogs.

While inventorying the rooms, Coraline discovers a small, secret door, which when opened has been bricked up. Outside while water-witching with a dowsing rod in hopes of finding a magic well, she makes acquaintance with gregarious Wyborne Lovat (voiced by Robert bailey Jr), wearing one of his weird masks, whom she labels a stalking psycho nerd, and his mangy cat; Wybie's grandmother owns the apartments, into which he's forbidden to enter for the rooms being haunted.

The boy gives Coraline an ancient ragdoll with button eyes, which had belonged to his grandmother's sister, because it resembles the new girl. Taking her "little me" with her to sleep, Coraline wakes in the middle of the night and follows a mouse downstairs, leading her through the now open passageway of the secret door.

On the other side she finds a woman resembling her mother cooking: "I'm your other mother." Her other father, unlike her real father, plays a piano but with mechanical hands the piano provides: "We've been waiting for you." These other parents are entertaining, capable of serving delicious meals, and very much interested in her; they also have buttons for eyes.

The next morning Coraline awakes back in her bedroom on the side with her real parents. When delivering a pile of mailed packages to Mr Bobinsky, he whispers strangely to Coraline that his circus mice want her to know: "Do not go through the little door." While visiting and having tea with Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, who proudly show her their shelves filled with their departed stuffed pets, April reads danger in the girl's tea leaves, though Miriam contradicts her interpretation. Further, Wybie explains that his grandmother's sister disappeared inside the house long ago.

The next night Coraline again trails after three mice through the secret passage where she's delighted by the wonders on display in her other father's amazing garden; he declares: "Everything's right in this world." Her other mother introduces her to a mute Wybie with a permanent happy-face smile; together the children enter Mr B's fantastic circus with dozens of performing mice.

Back on the real side again, she tries opening the secret door with a key in the daytime. "I knew it was real," she exclaims before once again crawling through. This time the cat (voiced by David Keith) cautions her: "You probably think this world is a dream come true, but you're wrong."

Coraline and Wybie enter a theater full of dogs in the audience where Miss Forcible and Miss Spink perform and sing on stage nearly naked before erupting from their bloated figures into a pair of youthful trapeze artists, pulling the girl into their act. Her other parents ask her if she'd like to remain in this other world forever - "You could stay here if you want to," says her other mother - but there's just one condition, about which her button-eyed other father says: "Soon you'll see things our way."

Director/ screenwriter Henry Selick's bewitching stop-motion animation of enchantment, adapted from Neil Gaiman's novel, suddenly pirouettes into suspenseful wickedness with a beldam who further transforms herself into a spidery hand with needle digits. Caught in a web of illusion intended to impress and lure in the unsuspecting (similar to a digital matrix beyond which nothing exists as in The Thirteenth Floor), Coraline discovers the ghosts of other victims and searches for her disappeared real parents, using a candy charm the old maids fashioned for her.

Her only chance for escape, along with rescuing her parents and recovering the souls of others trapped in the bedlam's other dimension, is to challenge the witch to a game of seek and find before the riddled plexus disintegrates.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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