Starring: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Robert Baily Jr. Keith David, Ian McShane
Director: Henry Selick
Runtime: 100 Minutes
Rating: PG
Distributor: Focus Features

Animator and stop-motion director Henry Selick has up to now had every right to be more than a little pissed off really. While it is certainly true that the idea for The Nightmare Before Christmas came from Tim Burton, the dashing ghoulish mayhem that so delights its many devotees was really entirely down to Selick. So while Disney now annually trots out “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” to the theaters on Halloween week, the chorus line audience still claps and cheers remaining largely unaware of who the hell Henry Selick even is.

Well all that hopefully is about to change. Working from a massively successful, award-winning story from the king of literary kook, Neil Gaiman, Selick has fashioned another gothic fairytale that blends the devilish and the delightful into a glorious 3D spectacle of color and imagination.

The story follows the precocious young girl, Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) whose parents move the family out to a rickety old Victorian mansion way up in the hills outside Portland. Bogged down in their crusty, bohemian existence, her parents spend all their time writing a gardening catalogue and have next to no time for their daughter. Bored and lonely Coraline explores the house and the hillside, running into neighbor boy Wybie (short for Why Be Born – parents don’t get much sympathy in Coraline) who tells her that her new home has a history of disappearing kids. That night a troupe of jumping circus mice show her to a mystical portal to a mirror world where everyone has buttons for eyes and her parents are loving and dote on her endlessly. She can stay forever if she wants to; all she has to do is give herself, and her eyes, to her new family.

Click here to read the full review at Uinterview.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under Animation, Feature Films, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.