Is Coraline really only six years old? It feels as though it's been around for much, much longer, lurking on the edge of my consciousness like a statue in a darkened room.
I was fascinated with it from the moment I heard it was in production. Neil Gaiman, the author of the original novella, isn't always my precise cup of tea but when he's on form, few can match his work for intelligence or charm. His intricate stories, which weave a tapestry of modern life shot through with threads of ancient myth, seemed to mesh perfectly with the stop-motion models I saw in early stills.
With all this established, however, I have to admit that it's only been a couple of years since I saw Coraline for the first time, and that this is because I had to wait until I was having a brave day. I'm skittish around horror movies at the best of times, and somehow, horror movies about and/or intended for kids often feel like the scariest ones of all.
Make no mistake, Coraline is a proper horror film - specifically, an old-school creepfest. We spend probably the majority of the movie establishing the character of Coraline Jones, freshly uprooted from her Michigan home and moved, protesting, to an apartment within a remote elderly house with shades of the Overlook Hotel.
Benignly neglected by her parents and too smart for her own good, Coraline seeks her own amusement. The neighbours are too weird, though, and the landlord's grandson talks too much. When, therefore, Coraline discovers a tiny door in a remote room, a brief moment of excitement ensues until she finds out that nothing lurks behind it but bricks.
That night, however, when she checks again, she finds a tunnel to an alternate world, with alternate parents and neighbours whose sole aim in life, seemingly, is to find new ways to delight her. Over the nights that follow, Coraline spends more and time at the other end of the tunnel, until her Other Mother finally invites her to stay permanently. All she has to do is sew two black buttons over her eyes...
From hereon out, things get seriously creepy, and if you're squeamish about eyes then you'd best steer clear. For the rest of us, though, there's delicious nastiness, a neat false ending and one or two truly visceral shocks on the way.
None of which goes even halfway to explaining why I love this movie so much. There's no day or week it can't brighten, no matter how burned out I might be on films in general and writing about them in particular. Obviously, the look of it has a major part to play - it's done in production company Laika's house style, with delicate models heavily enhanced by painterly CGI. Nothing else looks like a Laika film, not even another Laika film. Director Henry Selick's work is also highly distinctive, albeit in a more consistent fashion, and it's easy to trace Coraline's lineage back to the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.
My absolute favourite thing about this one, though, the single quality that raises it to the rank of greatness, is its pacing. It's a beautiful film with a beautiful soundtrack, and the best thing about all of this is that it gives the audience the time to appreciate all that beauty on their own terms. The camera lingers perfectly happily and pans over the gardens or track's Coraline's progress through the house, inviting the audience to savour the staggering amount of hard work that must have gone into creating it all. By immersing us so deeply in Coraline's world, Selick intensifies the horror we feel when it all starts to come apart at the seams.
According to the imdb, Selick hasn't directed another film since Coraline. I haven't always enjoyed his work in the past, but if this is what he can do when he's on top form, I really hope we'll be seeing more from him soon.
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