Director Henry Selick specializes in stop-motion animation of a particular type: beautiful, painstaking, meticulous, and slightly unsettling. The shared DNA is obvious in projects like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wendell & Wild and the underappreciated James and the Giant Peach. But Coraline especially benefits from his enthralling but upsetting, just-barely-wrong aesthetic.
Based on the Neil Gaiman book, Coraline is the story of a bored eleven-year-old girl who finds a little door in the wall of her new house that leads sometimes to a brick wall, and other times to a mirror world where her parents have been replaced by loving, interesting, horrifying button-eyed doppelgangers. Lavish in the beautifully constructed and ineffably creepy world of Coraline — celebrating its 15th anniversary this year!
Coraline is rated PG for scary images, some language.