Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)

Featuring a sassy young girl in a new home finding herself at nights in a surreal version of the same environment, with talking animals and people with buttons for eyes, this is another lustrous stop-motion animation from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. As with Nightmare, it's spruced up digitally, again sparingly enough to avoid swamping the gratifying solidity of the underlying figurines under too much sheen.
This time the source is renowned fantasist Neil Gaiman's book rather than a Tim Burton script. Regardless the visual influence of the Burton collaboration lingers, from the broad range of caricature body types to the wildly imaginative backdrops, and is felt even more strongly as the story turns more sinister and gothic. Where it's somewhat lacking, then, is in a true style and heart of its own, but the verve and ingenuity of the images does offer ample compensation.

6/10