Coraline Movie Free Online

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There are many scenes and images in "Coraline" that are likely to scare children. This is not a warning but rather a recommendation, since the cultivation of fright can be one of the great pleasures of youthful moviegoing. As long as it doesn't go too far toward violence or mortal dread, a film that elicits a tingle of unease or a tremor of spookiness can be a tonic to sensibilities dulled by wholesome, anodyne, school-approved entertainments.

Books, these days, often do a better job than movies of parceling out juvenile terror. There is plenty of grisly screen horror out there for teenagers, of course, but younger children are more amply served by fiction from the likes of R. L. Stine, Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman, on whose fast-moving, suspenseful novel "Coraline" is based. The film, an exquisitely realized 3-D stop-motion animated feature directed and written by Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "James and the Giant Peach") has a slower pace and a more contemplative tone than the novel. It is certainly exciting, but rather than race through ever noisier set pieces toward a hectic climax in the manner of so much animation aimed at kids, "Coraline" lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

Its look and mood may remind adult viewers at various times of the dreamscapes of Tim Burton (with whom Mr. Selick worked on "Nightmare"), Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch. Like those filmmakers Mr. Selick is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama.

The governing emotion, at the beginning, is loneliness. A smart, brave girl named Coraline Jones, voiced by Dakota Fanning, has recently moved from Michigan to an apartment in a big pink Victorian house somewhere in Oregon. She is at an age when the inadequacy of her parents starts to become apparent, and Coraline's stressed-out, self-absorbed mom and dad (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), who write about gardening, barely look up from their computer screens when she's in the room. And so, like many a children's book heroine before her, Coraline sets out to explore her curious surroundings, interweaving the odd details of everyday reality with the bright threads of imagination. She is accompanied from time to time by a local boy (Robert Bailey Jr.) and a talking cat (Keith David).

Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline's dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment. Her neighbors are a collection of eccentrics whose physical peculiarities match their quirks of character. Upstairs there is a Russian circus artist with the rasping voice of Ian McShane, while below a pair of aging burlesque performers twitter and chirp in the giddy tones of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, queens of British TV comedy.

A secret door in the wall, which opens only at night, leads Coraline to a parallel world that at first seems to fulfill her sad heart's every desire. The versions of her parents who live there — a queen-bee "other mother" and her agreeable mate — are warm and attentive, and the pink house is a wild wonderland where gardens bloom in moonlight and every visit discloses new amusements. The oddball neighbors are there, in altered form, to enthrall Coraline with nightly spectacles — a dream vaudeville that will transfix the movie's audience as well.

The 3-D aspects of "Coraline" are unusually subtle. Now and then stuff is flung off the screen into your face, but the point is not to make you duck or shriek. Instead Mr. Selick uses the technology to make his world deeper and more intriguing. And of course the stop-motion technique he uses, based on sculptured figures rather than drawn images, is already a kind of three-dimensional animation. The glasses you put on are thus not a gimmick but an aid to seeing what's already there.

And what is there, on the screen, is almost too much to absorb in one sitting: costumed mice and Scottish terriers; glowing blossoms and giant insects. The "other" world Coraline explores is fascinating, but also unsettling. Everyone there has buttons for eyes, like homemade dolls, and if she wants to stick around, Coraline will have to become like them.

This simple, horrifying operation — foreshadowed in the haunting opening title sequence — unlocks a cellarful of psychological implications. It would be too simple to say that the door in the wall leads directly to the unconscious. Mr. Selick is hardly a doctrinaire Freudian, but he does grasp the intimate connection between fairy tales and the murky, occult power of longing, existential confusion and misplaced desire. "Coraline" explores the predatory implications of parental love — that other mother is a monster of misplaced maternal instinct — but is grounded in the pluck and common sense of its heroine, who is resilient, ingenious and magically real.