Coraline

Coraline never stops taking artistic risks. I hope there's a brave enough audience out there willing to take the plunge.

All involved in this production deserve praise for turning Coraline into a triumph of storytelling and cinematic technology. Whether you're young, middle-age or older, you'll adore it.

This dark edge will be the biggest test of the film as a commercial prospect: it may be too terrifying for the target audience. But for braver kids - and parents - this is a thrilling, even challenging ride.

Employing stop-motion animation that renders human beings with the distinctive characteristics evident in both The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, Selick finds the perfect look to bring Gaiman's vision to life.

A gift to imagination.

Neil Gaiman's hugely popular 2002 children's horror novel Coraline has been given the animated 3-D treatment but you may want to keep the toddlers away from this one.

... a gorgeous and imaginative storybook fantasy with nightmare echoes. Think Dr. Seuss by way of Edward Gorey ...

For all its shortcomings, Coraline nevertheless has more imagination, heart and inventiveness in it than most recent animated films.

You know from the very first sequence that Coraline is an extraordinary movie that is going to rattle the bejeezus out of young audience members and -- the truth be told -- their fathers as well.

It would be difficult for any filmmaker to mimic Gaiman's seductively amusing and imaginative writing, and Selick, who also wrote the script, should be commended for not falling back on some golden-tongued narrator. But his Coraline could use more spunk.

The movie, though, dares not go below the surface. Could the problem be its use of 3-D? Did the filmmakers think that to offset this additional, illusory visual dimension they had to remove all depth from the story itself?

It's the stop-motion figures themselves who steal the show. They're so vivid and expressive, in both body and facial movements, that they cease being mere puppets and take on a life all their own.