Fairy Tale Theater

The Nightmare Before Christmas director brings Neil Gaiman's ghoulish novella to the screen.

by Shaun Brady

HOLE-SOME: Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) climbs into an alternate universe that isn't the wonderland it seems.

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There's hardly a shot in Henry Selick's stop-motion concoction that doesn't beg to be freeze-framed, its sumptuously eerie design savored for every dark detail. With each gnarled tree this laboriously doted on, however, it comes as no surprise that Selick seems to have lost sight of the haunted forest.

Adapted from Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's horror novella, Coraline is a traditional fairy tale, albeit one with a particularly ghoulish bent. Young Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) feels utterly bored and neglected. Her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have moved the family into a rundown old boarding house peopled by a hodgepodge of eccentrics, including a Russian acrobat (Ian McShane) who claims to be training a mouse circus and a pair of aging, bickering burlesque stars (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French).

Deserted by her folks who write for a garden catalog — they don't ever actually garden, which would at least offer the opportunity to get her hands dirty — and the only other kid in the vicinity the pesky, somewhat morbidly obsessed Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), Coraline spends a rainy day exploring her new home, where a secret door leads through an umbilical passageway to an alternate, far more attractive reality run by her Other Mother, a doting, indulgent bizarro-world mom with black buttons for eyes.

This parallel universe full of attention and dessert and elaborate production numbers staged solely for Coraline's benefit seems ideal, but as she digs deeper she finds that it's more a trap than a wonderland. Just as she seems poised to forsake that dreary old world for this wish-fulfillment replica, she learns of the trade-offs involved in getting exactly what you ask for. The fantasy soon begins to come apart at the (literal) seams, and Coraline is forced to play detective with the help of a few of her unhappy predecessors and a friendly black cat with Keith David's gruff purr of a voice.

As a colorful careful-what-you-wish-for parable, Coraline's journey through the secret door takes its place in the tradition of other, more familiar adventures through the looking glass or into gingerbread cottages, immeasurably sweet on the surface but rotten at their cores. But Selick is such a visual stylist that he neglects to draw a hard boundary between the drab everyday and the fantastic dreamworld. Sure, Coraline's reality is presented in muted grays and blues as opposed to the candy-colored world of the Other Mother, but it's nonetheless filled with fantastic surprises and off-the-wall characters. It's hard to believe Coraline could find this surreal environment such a drag. It is exhausting, though, as the real-world neighbors and their button-eyed counterpart compete in carnivalesque volume.

As the Other Mother's evil intent begins to reveal itself, however, Selick's design and the increasingly creepy action meld into a baroquely horrific whole that's equal parts Tim Burton (Selick's collaborator on The Nightmare Before Christmas) and macabre cartoonist Charles Addams. At these points the film may find kids cowering, given the immersive quality of the digital 3D.

Selick's use of the technology is particularly laudable. He uses the depth perception to investigate the topography of his sets, making Coraline's new home feel empty and spacious, her fantasy realm cluttered and animated. Even when he does go for the leap-from-the-screen shock effect, the moments seem to lead from the story rather than vice versa. The standoff between Coraline and the transformed, spidery Other Mother is a vertiginous tour-de-force.

As delightful as the film's look and style may be, they are its only delights. Fairy tales as a general rule are simple things, with characters and plots designed to stress a moralistic point. Coraline shares those qualities, but burdens the shallowness with such fanfare and ornamentation that it seems to be trying to cover for some perceived deficiency. The handmade charm of its stop-motion animation is recognized and echoed by the film's doll motif, but it gets glossed over by a showiness that contradicts those qualities.

Composer Bruno Coulais' score, however, always seems to strike the right tone, a gothic lullaby full of the dark mystery and shadowy enticements of this fantasy world.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Coraline | Directed by Henry Selick | A Focus Features release | Opens in area theaters Friday