Wybie (voiced by Robert Bailey Jr.) goes exploring with his new neighbor Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) in Henry Selick's stop-motion animated 3-D adventure Coraline.

LITTLE ROCK — Somehow I'd made it this far in life without having ever seen a 3-D movie on the big screen. That changed last weekend, when I took in Coraline, the animated creepfest from writer/director/production designer Henry Selick, director of other popular animated features like James And The Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

And like Nightmare, this film ain't for the little kiddies.

The Plot

Coraline Jones is an only-child tweener whose family has just moved from Pontiac, Mich., to the rural countryside. Both her parents are writers, and their area of expertise is gardening, though neither of them care much to get their hands dirty.

Coraline feels trapped in a boring existence at her new home, a boarding house the family shares with three eccentric neighbors: a pair of washed-up stage actresses and a retired Russian acrobat who is training kangaroo mice to put on a circus.

Ever curious and lacking much attention or supervision from her parents, Coraline discovers a portal into an alternate world, one that looks exactly like hers, only better. In this new world her parents dote on her and provide her every wish, the annoying neighbor boy isn't allowed to speak to her and the housemates' interests, which seem odd in the real world, blossom as magical amusements for the young girl.

Each night she slips through the portal into the other world, only to return to the real world when she wakes the next morning. But the more time she spends in the "other" world, the more she realizes that getting everything you want never comes without a price.

The Cast

My sister-in-law's assessment of Dakota Fanning is that she's out and out creepy. This film, in which Miss Fanning provides the voice of the title character, doesn't do anything to change sis-in-law's mind.

Teri Hatcher provides the voice of Coraline's mother and "other" mother, and there's a creepy resemblance (well, there's a lot about this film that's creepy) to the real Teri Hatcher near the end of the movie as Coraline's "other" parents undergo a transformation.

Keith David and Ian McShane are the other notable voices in the film, though Deadwood fans will be hard-pressed to recognize McShane's signature pipes as he masks them in a thick Russian accent for the role of Mr. Bobinsky, the retired acrobat.

The Good

Like in Selick's previous films, Coraline's world (even her real world) is one in which things are a little bit odd, a little bit dark, but completely compelling. There's something about it that makes us want to know more.

The isolated setting helps. It's a story prop that was used wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho and Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, and Selick makes it work here.

Coraline's struggle in the end is with a tangible evil that she can see, but ultimately she struggles with change, growing up and the acceptance of bad situations. These are very real themes that the audience can relate to, even if they're subtly hidden within the context of a fantasy tale.

The Bad

Young parents beware. This is not a kids' movie. At least not a movie for kids under 11 or 12, at the youngest. Even though it centers on a young girl and her perception of her world, there's a lot of adult sensibilities and themes that younger children would find disturbing (heck, I found a lot of it to be disturbing).

The animation, too, is inconsistent. For the most part, it's brilliant, but there are moments here and there where the cartoons resemble claymation, both in form and in action. I couldn't tell if it was just bad animating or the effect of some of the animation not transferring well to 3-D.

Three and a half stars