Fairy tale and nightmare.(Coraline)(Movie review)

I DON'T know how young I was when my well-meaning parents took me to see Darby O'Gill and the Little People, one of the Walt Disney Company's live-action efforts from the Eisenhower era, which was being screened for some sort of kids'movie day at the local university. Young enough, certainly, that I don't recall much about the film--not the songs, not the blarney-encrusted plot, not even Sean Connery in one of his early leading roles. All I remember is the harrowing conclusion, when the banshee, the herald of death, made a spectral, fluorescent-green appearance--and close on its keening heels came the shadowy "death coach," with a headless horseman driving silhouetted steeds across mists and scudding clouds. And even these details are sketchy in my memory (I tracked down the scene on YouTube for the purposes of this review), since the moment the death coach creaked on screen I rushed wailing from the theater, my harried father close behind.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Unless your preteen child is especially tough-minded, I would keep this cautionary tale in mind when trying to decide whether to take the whole family to see Coraline, a stop-motion-animated, 3-D-enhanced adaptation of Neil Gaiman's slim, award-winning 2002 fairy tale. It's one of the best non-Pixar children's movies of recent vintage, but it's also far and away the creepiest, woven through with uncanniness and studded with moments of pure horror. Today's younger generation is probably too jaded to quail at a banshee (especially one conjured up through the cumbersome magic of late-'50s special effects), but I'm pretty sure that there are terrors in Coraline capable of sending many a seven-year-old squealing for the exits.

The movie's set-up is the stuff of great stories and bad dreams. Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is the resourceful, blue-haired daughter of two distracted parents, who finds herself adrift in the rambling, decaying multi-family Victorian where her family has rented an apartment. There are bizarre neighbors upstairs and down--a mustachioed, pot-bellied Russian in the attic, and two fading, coquettish actress sisters in the basement--and an annoying, motorbike-riding boy who lives next door and pals around with a prickly cat. But what Coraline wants is her parents' attention, and they're too busy writing garden catalogues (while the house's actual garden languishes untended) to notice.

What she gets instead is a secret door, bricked-up by day, that opens by night into an alternative version of her house and life, in which her "other mother" and "other father" are always loving and attentive, the neighbors put on mouse circuses and song-and-dance numbers round the clock, and the out-of-doors blooms with exotic flora that ...