Coraline is the best movie of the year.  So far, anyway.

Coraline
Directed by Henry Selick
Starring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgeman, Keith David
****

There’s a lot to say about Coraline, Henry Selick’s animated adaptation of the Neil Gaiman’s chilling children’s tale, but let me give you my four-word review right up front: I love this movie.  I knew it was going to be something special when I saw about thirty minutes worth of footage at a presentation last fall, but the finished product is beyond what I could have hoped for.  On a technical level alone, Coraline is a stunning achievement and may just be the finest example of stop-motion animation yet put onscreen.  (Although Nick Park’s seminal Wallace & Gromit shorts offer stiff competition.)  I’m not exaggerating when I say that you’ve never seen anything quite like the fantastical images that Selick (who made his feature debut with 1994′s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie many still think was directed by its producer Tim Burton) and his team of animators have conjured up here.  From squeaky circus mice performing an elaborate song-and-dance routine, to a lush garden filled with giant snails and chatty flowers, to a seemingly ordinary room that transforms into a giant spider web, Coraline offers one dazzling setpiece after another.  It’s the very definition of movie magic—the world onscreen is so beautiful, so enveloping, so real, you feel like you’re a part of it instead of simply observing the action from the comfort of your theater seat.

Unlike the film version of Gaiman’s Stardust, which made several significant changes to the source material that wound up hurting the film, Selick pulls off the delicate task of adapting the story in his own voice without losing the spirit of the original book.  On the page, Coraline is basically a grade-school version of a horror film, filled with numerous passages guaranteed to give kids (and more than a few adults) nightmares.  The film version lightens the tone significantly and yet an undercurrent of danger and fear remains throughout, feelings that you rarely see in the majority of kid-friendly films made these days.  Even Pixar, the gold standard when it comes to contemporary children’s movies, would rather teach kids life lessons than freak them out.

As in the book, the film follows the titular pre-teen girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who has moved with her workaholic parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgeman) to a remote house that they share with a pair of English spinsters (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) and a strange acrobat who claims to be the ringmaster of a mouse circus (Ian McShane).  Homesick and tired of Mom and Dad’s neglect, Coraline desperately needs some adventure in her life and finds it when she happens upon a mysterious passageway that takes her into a parallel universe where her Other Mother and Other Father live.  Where her real-world parents are always buried in work, this Mom and Dad live to make her happy.  They cook her favorite foods, play fun games and fill the house with cool talking creatures.  There’s only one thing that’s slightly…well, weird about them: they have buttons for eyes.  And if Coraline wants to continue to live with them, she too has to trade in her eyeballs for buttons, an operation she’s understandably reluctant to undergo.  That’s when she discovers the dark truth about the Other Mother and this beautiful fantasy world quickly turns into a nightmare.

There are things about Coraline I could pick apart if I really wanted to.  Some of the vocal performances, for example, aren’t quite as strong as they could be.  I’m specifically thinking of McShane’s vaguely Russian accent and Hatcher’s “Other Mother” persona, which could have used a touch more menace.  I can’t say that I’m particularly enamored of Coraline’s next-door frenemy, a rambunctious kid named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), either.  Selick primarily created this character (who doesn’t appear in the book) to give his star someone her own age to talk to and while that may have been a good practical decision it never really works creatively.  Instead of feeling like an organic part of the story, Wybie frequently comes across like an afterthought.

Still, none of these minor flaws can dampen my enthusiasm for what Selick has accomplished here.  At a time when Hollywood has increasingly turned towards CG-animation, Selick employs stop-motion–one of the earliest forms of animation–to create a film that looks just as good and, in some ways, better than the stuff that DreamWorks Animation and even Pixar is doing.  He also makes spectacular use of the 3D gimmick, layering his images so that you can see small details in the background of every frame.  Coraline may look like a kids’ movie, but it’s a movie for anyone of any age who wants to experience the joy and wonder that comes with seeing a true cinematic artist at work.

Verdict: See It, See It, See It

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Also in Theaters

Push
Directed by Paul McGuigan
Starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou
**

How could a film with such promise go so wrong?  When it’s handed to Paul McGuigan, the director that made the double feature that killed Josh Hartnett’s career, Lucky Number Slevin and Wicker Park.  Of course, McGuigan’s lackluster filmmaking skills are only half of Push‘s problem.  The other half is David Bourla’s script, which takes a great premise and screws it up with an incoherent, plodding story.  Here’s the set-up: taking place in a world populated by folks with psychic powers, Push chronicles the adventures of Cassie (Dakota Fanning again), who can see the future, and Nick (Chris Evans), a telekinetic, as they attempt to track down and recover a case containing a mysterious serum.  In order to find the case, they first have to find Kira (Camilla Belle), Nick’s ex-girlfriend who also happens to be a powerful “pusher”–someone who can implant false memories in other peoples’ minds.  Also on Kira’s trail is Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou), an agent with the top-secret government program that created and monitors the whereabouts of everyone with powers.  In the hands of another director and screenwriter, Push could have been something special and, in fact, I’d love to see someone else take this same material and fashion another movie (or ongoing comic book series) out of it.  McGuigan and Bourla do deserve credit for setting the movie in Hong Kong, which is an inspired backdrop, and there are certainly plenty of great stories that can be told in a universe filled with psychic superheroes.  It’s just a shame this specific story wasn’t one of them.

Verdict: Skip It