CORALINE

Director Henry Selick, the magic man behind the stop-motion animation of The Nightmare Before Christmas, attempts to replicate the success of that funny-macabre cult hit in Coraline.

I don’t think that’s going to happen. Despite top-drawer animated work that springs to life in 3-D, Coraline doesn’t have the offbeat ingredients of Christmas, in which eerie Halloween characters collided with Santa Claus for a film that appealed to both adults and children.

Coraline is a sort of Gothic horror that centers on a little girl who discovers a parallel version of her life when she travels down a glowing tunnel hidden behind a bricked-up little door in the gloomy Victorian apartment building her parents have moved into. It’s an Alice in Wonderland kind of tale, but it isn’t grown up enough to have wide appeal for adults. With its ghosts, characters that have button eyes and a scary witch with skeletal metallic fingers, it probably would frighten the little children who would be its core audience.

The human characters are very plastic looking, with sharp pointy noses. Coraline has straight purple hair. Although Dakota Fanning brings her to emotional life through her voice, there’s not a lot of warmth to pull one into the film.

Coraline is lonely. Her parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are too caught up in their work to pay much attention to Coraline. He’s writing a book about gardening. The only nearby child her age is a twitchy boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), who appears from his downcast spirit and tilted head to be very lonely and distressed.

The catalyst for Coraline is the doll she’s given that looks just like her, except for its button eyes. When she goes down that tunnel, like Alice down the rabbit hole, Coraline discovers a world that looks just like hers, except all the people have button eyes, including the woman who claims to be her mother . . . only warmer and nicer than her real mother. Coraline even begins thinking that this parallel world might be a better place to live than her real world . . . at least until her parallel mother insists that she must first lose her eyes and replace them with buttons. Then things turn a little, well, spooky.

Going back and forth between this world and her real world, Coraline encounters a pair of eccentric sisters (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) who put on an outlandish stage play whose audience is filled with Scottie dogs, a flamboyant athletic man who runs a circus whose performers are red-jacketed mice on parade, a very wise talking black cat (Keith David) and a trio of ghost children. The ghosts hold the key to the dark secret of a long-missing girl and the terrors that Coraline will face.

All of this looks great in 3-D with Selick’s peerless stop-motion animation. But the story, which Selick based on the book by Neil Gaiman, has Coraline traveling back and forth between these two worlds, some of which may be a dream. It all may be too much of a confusing overload for young children.

By the time the witch turns up — not to mention the Scotties who turn into bats — this Wonderland has turned into a dark nightmare. But there’s no Santa Claus and no Christmas at the end of this tale.

***Coraline

Voices: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Robert Bailey Jr., Keith David, Ian MacShane.

Rated: PG, contains scary elements.

mjanuson@projo.com