Coraline: Critic Reviews

A delightfully dark fairy tale!

This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in [Henry] Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness.

Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

Some scary fun.

Coraline is a plucky heroine, and director Selig's imagination is indisputable. But the story falters in parts, and its dark tone could be off-putting for children.

For all its visual delights, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama.

If you have a 10-and-up who's drawn to alt-comics, smart books, dark clothing, and general pop culture subversion, the movie will be his or her Wonderland.

An extraordinary achievement that nevertheless falls short of its full potential, Coraline is absolutely worth seeing, for older children and adults alike.

A a children's entertainment that's much too scary for little kids (ugly insects provide a pervasive visual motif) and too lifeless to enchant older audiences.

It is a sumptuous visual feast and a perfectly enchanting story.

Parents may need to give a reassuring squeeze now and then, but Coraline is the best kind of children's entertainment -- smartly told and deeply felt.

The writer-director and his gifted animators impress with stop-motion detail. Yet Coraline is short on delight

[Director] Selick has a great fantasy filmmaker's artistry, but he lacks that overflowing Geppetto-esque love that brings puppets to life. In Coraline, he's woozy with his own lyricism.

A gift to imagination.

I admire the film mostly because it is good to look at.

Would the 8-year-old me have fallen for Coraline? Maybe not. Like my own 8-year-old, at that age I was more into comedy than anything designed to give me the comic willies. But the adult me is a big fan.

The problem is Gaiman's story, which keeps accumulating otherworldly mythology but doesn't establish a clear line of action in the home stretch.

Is it premature to assign it classic status?

A labor of love in every frame.

Spooky, stunning and savvy, Coraline is one of those kids movies that makes you wonder if all the kids are going to walk out of the theater with hair scared white and eyeballs frozen in awe.

Tales of alternate worlds are always fascinating when done right, and Coraline fits that description.

Eerily inhabiting the netherworld where a young girl's wildest dreams become her cruelest nightmares, Coraline is a dark delight.

This is perhaps the most effective 3-D movie I have ever seen, with a sophisticated, involving story that will appeal to many adults.

For all the polished electrons of the latest works from Pixar, Blue Sky or DreamWorks, Selick and Co. show that stop-motion animation still looks, moves and feels like nothing at all the computer animator's terrabytes can mimic.

This animated screen rendering of Neil Gaiman's masterful children's horror fantasy is so full of life and texture, it's almost gilding the lily to add the third dimension to it.