Absolutely beautiful!!! A scintillating and supple combination of traditional stop motion and digital animation.

Adapted AND directed by Henry Selick (the visionary director of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas) from acclaimed British author Neil Gaiman’s novella.

Dakota Fanning stars as our hero Coraline (not Caroline) who with her new friend Wybie and The Cat that isn’t exactly his (playfully voiced by Keith David whose voice is indelible to me as clan leader Goliath from Disney’s Gargoyles) adventure around The Pink House (Coraline’s new home owned by Wybie grandmother) and meet it’s eccentric occupants: retired theatrical sisters (Jennifer Saunders as Miss Spink and Dawn French as Miss Forcible) and their yapping terriers in the basement and Mr. Bubinski (voiced by Ian McShane) and his circus mice who go tweedle-dee-dee instead of oom-pah-pah in the attic; and explore behind the little door in the wall into an other world…an exciting and magical world that seems almost too good to be true…beware the beldam!

I wonder if Gaiman’s choice of villain name is at all a play on the word bedlam…