Coraline is a frightening children’s movie no matter how old you are. That’s not a warning but a recommendation since one of the great sensations of childhood is film-induced fear. As long as there are no flying limbs or grotesque images, a dose of innocent fright can wake a child up to the wonders of imagination.

Neil Gaiman’s award-winning 2002 novella Coraline kick-started the imaginations of children and critics alike, inspiring a musical, video game, graphic novel, and of course, a film. The movie is slower paced than the book, giving the viewer time to enjoy the exquisite stop-motion 3D animation done by director Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame). It takes nerve to try something new in an industry where Pixar rules the digital and Disney the drawn. The effect of Selick’s claymation is a sight that’s entirely new to a generation that wasn’t around to see Nightmare.

While the visuals are fresh, the skeleton of the plot is not. Gaiman’s story is a creative modernization of the ancient fantasy formula. Child is unhappy with surroundings; child pries for new surroundings and discovers surreal world; child becomes terrified of new world and returns home with refreshed perspective. It worked for Alice, it worked for Dorothy and it works for Coraline.

The dominant emotion at the beginning of the film is loneliness. Coraline’s family has just moved from Michigan into a large pink Victorian house in Ashland, Or and his performing mice to Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, hilariously voiced by Absolutely Fabulous creator Jennifer Saunders and her partner Dawn French.

The 3-D aspects of Coraline are subtle and effective. Selick uses the technology not as a gimmick but to draw the audience deeper into his world. The stop motion technique uses claymation instead of drawings, which gives the images a 3-D effect even without the glasses. And what images they are: Hundreds of costumed Scottie-dogs attentively watching performing trapeze artists, a circus run entirely by mice, giant insects and flowers with an appetite for little girls. It is a sensory overload, a journey through the fantastical tunnels of Selick’s mind.

It doesn’t take long for Coraline’s “ordinary world” to unspool. A secret door in the wall, which opens only at night, leads Coraline to a parallel world where everything is exactly like it is on the other side of the tunnel, but better. She has an “Other Mother” and an “Other Father” who are the new improved versions of her real parents. The mom cooks delicious food and lavishes attention on Coraline. The only thing that gives Coraline cause for trepidation is the vacant stare from the buttons where her “Other Parent’s” eyes should be. If Coraline wants to stay in their world, she will have to trade her eyes for buttons too.

This simple, horrifying operation — foreshadowed in the disturbing opening title sequence — suggests a myriad of psychological implications. It would be too simple to say that the door in the wall leads directly to the unconscious. Henry Selick is hardly a textbook Freudian but he does use a fantastic backdrop to relay the intricacies of a parent-child relationship.

Despite the fear induced by the “Other Mother’s” predatory behaviour, Coraline is a film grounded in its heroine’s virtue and resilience.