Coraline

If you compare Selick's Coraline and Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the winner is clear. The fantastic stop-motion animated Coraline wins. The film is visually almost unbeatable, it offers ten ideas for every minute, the few songs that are played are pleasantly crazy, the music is good, the characters are humorously bizarre... The problem is in the story, which is not uninteresting, but it gets boring at times, especially in the second half. But what the hell, I tell myself, it's a fairy tale. And a good one. Too bad it's not as adult as The Nightmare before Christmas... (18/08/2010)

Selick’s Caroline, sorry, Coraline lacks one thing. And that is the “button phobia" which, unlike in the book, never sets in. Maybe it’s because I don’t share Selick’s vision as a whole. It’s not nearly dark enough. There’s nobody quite like Dave McKean. This Coraline is an excellent animated movie, but nothing more. But the potential for more was here. (14/06/2009)

I was a bit worried when the film was slower to start and visibly tried to engage my imagination and some of my patience with its story, but after a few minutes the doubts were successfully erased and I became increasingly satisfied with the final form. Sure, it's no Miyazaki, it lacks Danny Elfman's catchy compositions and the story doesn't sound particularly likeable, but there's still the charm, the imaginative idea and the very original execution, which is always the most important thing in animation. The Oscar nomination, in my opinion, is well deserved and pretty much says it all. (15/10/2012)

The film features an Alice theme, a script for a short at most, and Selick's eccentric fantasizing. After half an hour it simply doesn't do anything and comes ever closer to the desperate cry "Let something start happening, for God's sake!" Ironically, what I enjoyed the most was Dakota, who intones perfectly and literally "acts" in the vocal positions of a nasty brat, a scared little girl, and a brave girl. The rest of it was terrible and didn't even need the assistance of Tim Burton. (31/12/2009)

This is an animation that you just don't see very often anymore. I'm especially glad that Henry Selick chose this particular book by Neil Gaiman to adapt into a stop-motion animated puppet film. Coraline looks amazing in this animation and I'm glad that there are still people who appreciate and put effort into stop motion animation. The result is definitely worth it. Additionally, the horror-themed animation is even better. And this fairytale has a strong horror element. (23/12/2013)