Truly magical; one of the year's best films

Rating: 10/10 (23 February 2009)

CORALINE (2009) **** (Voices of: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn Fanning, Robert Bailey, Jr., Ian McShane, Keith David.) Excellent stop-motion animated film adaptation of Neil Gaimon's book by wunderkind filmmaker Henry Selick about a young girl named Coraline (Fanning) whose seemingly unhappiness with her family discovers a doorway into a parallel world where she finds an Other Mother and Father, and realizes the motto of 'be careful what you wish for' as a golden rule. Filled with phantasmagoric elements of fantasy not unlike "Alice In Wonderland" but with a slightly darker edge and spookiness but a truly remarkable display of an art form that is rarely given its props and Selick and his team of magicians create an amazingly incredible tour-de-force of painstaking artistry to behold. One of the year's very best.