Puppett Master

The visual splendor of the creepy ' Coraline' is from another world *** 1/2 ( 3 1/2 STARS)

C oraline uses 3-D as a vehicle of artistic delight. The writer-director, Henry Selick, hewing closely to Neil Gaiman's novel, employs it not for cheap thrills but for wonder. The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

When Selick's independent-minded heroine, 11-year-old Coraline, follows a path through a tiny, square door into a house that looks mysteriously like her own, the tunnel she crawls through functions like Alice's rabbit hole or Dorothy Gale's cyclone. The difference between Coraline and those other fantasies is that the girl's world is as nutty as the fantasy world, but a lot less cozy and attractive.

Coraline's family has just moved from Michigan to the hills outside of Ashland, Ore., and rented the second story of a rambling, picturesque, three-story house. It's summer, and the only prospect of a pal is the scamp next door, Wybie, who races around on an electric bike while wearing Halloween masks three months early. Her parents have no time to minister to her loneliness. Coraline's father, on deadline for a garden catalog, offers nothing more than ineffectual warmth and some yucky home-cooked casseroles. Her mother wears the pants and carries the real brains in the family; she whips dad's catalog into shape. She doesn't sense her daughter's dire need for pleasure, even on a matter as mundane as buying a bright pair of gloves.

The movie is daringly upfront about the ambivalence that children have toward their parents. In the cracked, mirror-image world she enters through the tunnel, Coraline's "Other Mother" whips up voluptuous comfort food and supplies her with groovy duds, while her "Other Father" picks out tunes on a player piano that plays him. They want her to stay.

Selick and Gaiman surround the family with wacky supporting characters who alienate Coraline until they, too, show up on the other side of the magic door, magnificently transformed. She comes to see these off-putting figures the way they see themselves. The batty old British theater dames who once performed in Ashland's Shakespeare Festival perform an acrobatic music-hall act in a red-velvet theater full of their beloved Scottish terriers. They metamorphose in mid-act into the voluptuous babes they may have been in their youth. The 8-foot-tall blue Russian giant who lives upstairs and speaks of training his "Jumping Mouse Circus" really is a splendid figure. Through pleasure, Coraline develops empathy.