Coraline is a curious movie with a delusional villain and delightfully eccentric characters. Seeing it in 3D (and you should watch it wearing those 3D glasses) magnifies director Henry Selick's fine camera work. Before you rush off to see Coraline, though, know that the movie could lead to nightmares for youngsters under 10 years old.

Within the first few minutes, Selick introduces his directing style. As blue-haired Coraline walks near the Pink Palace Apartments - an old house converted into three apartments - we see her from behind a bush, and when the wooden door to a secret well is closed, we're underground watching the light above recede.

At times, the audience also sees the world from Coraline's point-of-view, but with these shots, Coraline's stop-motion animation world feels more real, as though we're peeking into this girl's life. What's great is that the effect doesn't get old.

As the inquisitive Coraline is trapped inside her new house when it rains, we see her disappointed face from outside a window--everything is more palpable in 3D than in the conventional version. When Coraline is bored and tries to get her dad's attention, we see her as a reflection in the screen on which he's typing. Why her dad uses an old-fashioned monochrome screen is unclear, but the impact of the shot remains the same.

Based on Neil Gaiman's 2002 bok by the same name, Coraline features dark and extraordinary images, but then this shouldn't be surprising coming from a science-fiction author who, 10 years ago, won an award from the Horror Writers Association. Anyone who's seen and enjoyed The Nightmare Before Christmas (also directed by Selick) will feel at home.

One of the first characters viewers see is the Amazing Bobinsky, a man Coraline's parents think is an alcoholic but is in reality training a circus of mice. Bobinsky is a proud yet amusing character before he says a word: a full chest is contrasted by stick-figure legs. As Coraline and her parents drive to the Pink Palace Apartments in their silver Volkswagen, Bobinksy is stretching on the roof.

Bobinksy isn't Coraline's only strange neighbor. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible also share the house. The two large old women were once popular entertainers, but their fame has grown stale, much like the 70-year-old taffy they offer Coraline, who is seeking an escape from her parents. She loves them, but wishes they had more time away from work to spend with her. After Coraline discovers a secret door in her new home, she gets plenty of attention from her "Other Parents," alternate versions of her real parents that seem to embody all the characteristics she wants in the real world. Not much time passes before Coraline realizes, to paraphrase the movie's tagline, she should be careful what she wishes for.

Coraline's Other Mother controls the alternate reality found a short crawl through the secret door. This becomes clear when she shows Coraline a new and improved version (well, to her at least) of her friend Wybie, whose mouth has been sewn shut.

"I thought you'd like him a bit more if he spoke a little less," the Other Mother says with a smile to Coraline, "so I fixed him."

Sometimes, we learn the most from people we'd rather ignore, and here we get another disturbing taste of the filling behind the colorful icing.

It's creepy that her Other Parents - who have buttons in place of eyes - watch her sleep at night before she returns to the real world, and after a while it's unsettling that everything is perfect in the alternate universe. Also disturbing is the soundtrack, with music performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. The vocal and instrumental background music is occasionally more intrusive to the film that it is a subtle complement to the movie's plot.

But oh, those visuals.

It turns out the Other Mother has only created enough of the Other World to keep Coraline interested in coming back, and when the strength of the button-eyed woman's imagination starts to fail, the movie-makers' imaginations run wild. Watching the Other Mother's fantasy world crumble presents aesthetically stimulating scenes that will remain with viewers long after they leave the theater.

Hopefully, those scenes will be remembered more than the scene featuring our favorite old ladies, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. In the Other World, the two women perform to Coraline, Wybie and hundreds of Scottie dogs. Perhaps for a cheap laugh, one of the women wears an extremely revealing outfit that leaves little of her large breasts to the imagination. In a movie targeting parents and their kids, that kind of visual is as inappropriate as it is unnecessary.

Once the ladies' show is over, Coraline regains its focus as a satisfying stop-motion animation movie placing form and function on the very same plane.