a movie review by: Shawn Levy

Sometimes you fall for a movie for the story it tells, sometimes for the mood it conveys, sometimes for the moment in which you saw it and sometimes for what's gone into making it.

I don't think it's an insult to anyone involved in "Coraline," from author Neil Gaiman, whose book it adapts, to the actors who lend voices to its characters, to the musicians who provide its evocative score, to say that the obsessive, miraculous detail that has been brought to bear in animating the film overwhelms all else in it.

Director Henry Selick and his team at Portland's Laika Entertainment have made a movie of extraordinary depth, intricacy and precision, a veritable portfolio of dazzling stop-motion sequences so virtuosic as to lift you not only out of your workaday brain but, sometimes, out of the film itself as well.

Your eye races over the billions of details that fill the frames and you have to remind yourself consistently that the appearance of motion is entirely artificial and -- even more -- that every object you see was designed and crafted and moved by hand, millimeter by millimeter, to bring it to life. It's almost impossible to credit.

There are blossoming gardens and fountains of water and glistening foodstuffs and clingy spider webs and scary mechanical gizmos and trained mice and drooling doggies and the textures of wood and rock and sky and earth and hair and wool and a variety of grotesque human types -- some real, some imaginary, all entirely convincing.

From the portrait of a household dominated by gloomy parental work to a fairy-tale vision of domestic bliss, from the needle-and-thread imagery of the title sequence (a knockout) to the convincing thrashing of a rat by a cat, from the instant blooming of a garden to the droll characterizations of the daily lives of show people, professional writers and ghosts, it's a visual masterwork, literally unlike anything you've ever seen (especially so in 3-D, as it's being shown in a number of theaters).

That said, all of this remarkable work is performed in the service of a story that's sometimes too slight to support it.

Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) has moved to a rickety boarding house in Ashland (there's a hilarious Shakespeare festival gag) with her parents, a pair of garden writers too gloomy and bedraggled to cook or clean house or even to plant a bulb or weed a bed. Hungry for a happier life, Coraline discovers a portal that leads her to a bizarro world where her mom whips up piles of yummy goodies, her dad is suave and musical, the annoying neighbor boy can't talk and the dilapidated house and garden are thriving.

But that family, she soon learns, is a ruse, and the "other mother" wants nothing less than to devour Coraline's soul and life.

This all plays out in episodic fashion that -- especially given the variety of animation styles and moods on display -- gives the storytelling a rather mechanically sequential feel: one set piece after another. There's lots of life throughout; among the vocal actors, Teri Hatcher makes a wonderfully two-faced villainess and Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Ian McShane are fun as retired show folk. But the lifeless dialogue and block-by-block momentum wear.

Of course, you may be too gob-smacked by the spectacle to care about the story, which, in my book, is one of the signs that you're actually in a movie theater and not reading. For its sheer visual gusto alone, "Coraline" is a wonder.

Ian McShane Photograph

Dakota Fanning Photo

Teri Hatcher Photo