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This is a good time for animation -- maybe one of the best ever. Just look at some of the films that have been made in the past few years, such as Pixar's Wall-E and Howl's Moving Castle from Studio Ghibli. Even a lot of the mediocre fare is great fun, such as the Shrek films, which might not be great art but know their way around pointed satire and clever parody. Heck, even television animation, such as Robot Chicken, is about as smart and as funny as you could hope television might be.

And yet, in this world of abundant excellence, the movie Coraline is distinct. It doesn't feel like popular entertainment so much as it does an art film, and it calls to mind unexpected comparisons. The Brothers Quay, for instance, who, for many years, who quietly labored away in a tiny studio in south London, producing exquisitely strange and detailed stop motion animation that defied conventional narrative, prefering instead to explore intricate, handcrafted dioramas that felt like elaborate, metaphoric puzzles. There is the Quay's meticulous eye for strange detail in Coraline, although this is a film that doesn't mask its storyline as the Quay's did. Instead, it populates an enormous pink mansion with a series of eccentric characters, and, in this way, the film recalls the work of Czech animator Jiri Trnka, who made charming but highly idiosyncratic stop-motion films populated with pleasantly odd characters. Neither the Brothers Quay nor Jiri Trnka have ever developed anything more than a cult audience in the United States, and so, to see a major studio release that seems to echo their art house aesthetics is entirely unexpected -- it's as though the obscure masters of stop motion had suddenly been given an enormous budget and complete freedom and were promised the results would play in the multiplex.

This is not the work of Trnka or The Quays, of course, but instead the pairing of author (and Minneapolis resident) Neil Gaiman and director Henry Selnick. It has been a particularly fine year for Gaiman: already an established author and writer for comic books (especially well-known for his Sandman series), Gaiman recently won the Newbery Medal, one of the highest honors given for children's literature, for his The Graveyard Book. This tale borrows its title and essential storyline from Kipling's The Jungle Book, but rather than tell of a boy raised by animals in the Indian bush, it tells of a boy raised in a boneyard by ghosts, witches, and werewolves. So you can see that Gaiman has both a strong sense of the fantastic and a propensity for riffing off older tales, and, in Coraline, the point of departure is Alice in Wonderland. The title character here is a spirited and already wilfully eccentric girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who discovers a mirror universe, much like her own, but better. In this alternate world, her parents dote on her, and the oddballs with whom she shares the mansion are transformed into magnificent entertainers, putting on dazzling shows just for her benefit. But there is something sinister about this world, at first demonstrated by the fact that everybody has button eyes, and later emphasized by the fact that Coraline is likewise expected to swap her own peepers out for buttons -- and a long needle and thread wait for her to acquiesce.

It's a potent fairy tale, in turns astonishing and horrifying, and its rather a miracle of good fortune that Selnick was put at its helm. Recently, another Gaiman story was brought to the screen, and it was rather mishandled, I felt. The film was Stardust, and the director, Matthew Vaughn, put tepid performers in his lead roles (Charlie Cox and Claire Danes, specifically) and labored the story's slight sense of whimsy; the resulting film felt like a forced exercise in the fantastic, with occasional moments of daffy comedy shoehorned in. Selnick, by comparison, is a director of terrific narrative skill, and I don't think he has ever gotten his due. He directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, as an example, and, from what I am able to tell, most people think Tim Burton was at the helm for that. Selnick also directed 1996's James and the Giant Peach, and I am not sure that ever found an audience, in part because Selnick has never been afraid to make his films a little unnerving, and his version of Roald Dahl's story both revelled in the wiggling horror of insects and tried to make them the tale's heroes. The resulting film was gorgeous but a bit hard to take if you had any entomophobia at all, and most of us do. The same wriggling terror finds its way into Coraline, but it appears infrequently and is distinctly villainous, and so considerably more palatable.

Selnick brings two important things to the film. The first, and most obvious, is an extraordinary attention to craft. While the film blends stop-motion with CGI animation, it does so seamlessly, and most of what you see on the screen wasn't generated by a computer, but instead painstakingly built by hand. Selnick pays meticulous attention to details -- the story takes place in as finely detailed a world as has ever been put on screen. It's not just that the pink mansion at the center of the story manages to look very old and dilapidated, it's that the building is full of little notes, written on yellow tape, warning you not to touch water heaters because they are hot and not to turn off certain switches because they will short out fuses. And if the real world is cluttered with quotidian reminders of its fragility and age, the fantastical world is cluttered with sensuous displays of elaborate meals (gravy travels around the table on an actual model train) and fantastical gardens in which snapdragons actually look like tiny dragons and actually snap. The film is full of neat details, some just barely making their way onto the frame -- in the real world, in town, a Shakespeare festival is going on, and every so often you see someone in Renaissance garb sashay by.

More importantly, Selnick brings to his animation an astounding ability to express character. Animation can be a lazy business, especially when you have good voice actors, but while Selnick's style of animation superficially resembles the holiday specials of Rankin and Bass, their stop motion consisted mostly of globe-shaped heads that expressed very little, but for occasionally arched eyebrows and rubber band mouths that moved in an approximation of what was being said. Selnick, in comparison, has every aspect of the little dolls he animates express their character. Coraline, as an example, has a distinct face, including a pointed and somewhat bent nose, all framed by a blunt blue haircut. More than that, she has a fidgety, constantly bored quality, which demonstrates itself in little acts of humorous whimsy -- when exploring the pink mansion, she will sometimes enter a room by pushing a door and then hanging from the top of it as it swings inward. There is something honestly childlike about that, and there is also something heartening about Coraline's steadfast refusal to be ordinary (again, one suspects, out of boredom). When shopping for clothes, she will demand multicolored knit gloves, because everything else she will be wearing to school is bland and grey.

The pink mansion is actually a good fit for Coraline, because the rest of the residents are likewise oddballs. There is a Russian circus performer who lives in the attic, and whose body is a hilarious caricature, having a barrel chest and paunchy stomach, but tiny arms and legs. He hops around the exterior of the mansion like it was one huge jungle gym, pausing only to do calisthenics and chew on beets. (He is voiced, with a booming Russian accent, by Ian McShane, who is probably best known as a figure of great menace on HBO's Deadwood). In the meanwhile, in the basement, there are two faded English burlesque artists, voiced by the comedy team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. The two totter around their apartment with an affected air of theatrical glamor, reading tea leaves and sewing angel costumes for their army of Scottish terriers (in preparation for when the dogs die, at which moment they are stuffed and put on a shelf). Although both women have expanded in some places and shrunk in others, in the way old women do, they retain a disarming lack of modesty from their burlesque days. One, who is blessed with bosoms the size of medicine balls, carries on in a manner that is nearly obscene.

Even Coraline's parents, voiced by Teri Hatcher and author John Hodgman (who is probably best known as the PC in the popular Mac computer commercials) are weirdos, although Coraline doesn't much appreciate them. Her mother wears a neck-brace, for unexplained reasons, and is both bossy and irritable, but is also surprisingly sympathetic toward Coraline's desire to stand out. Her father, in the meanwhile, is absent-minded and given to spontaneously inventing tuneless melodies about whatever he happens to be doing. The father is one of the best caricatures in the film: he spends all his time hunched over a computer, and, as a result, his long neck never become vertical, but instead prefers to push out horizontally from weak, curved shoulders, giving him the look of a giraffe who is leaning forward to pluck a leaf from a tree. In their own way, Coraline's parents are delightful, but it's easy to see why she doesn't see it, and why she might be charmed by the parents she finds in the alternate world, who dote on her. Coraline is attracted to these other parents long after they have stopped being appealing and have become a bit creepy, and even this is understandable. The alternate world, which features elaborate circus shows by kangaroo mice and high-flying acrobatics by an alternate set of burlesque performers, is so astounding that it is easy to want to stay there, and to have that world be endlessly terrific, as Coraline does. But Gaiman knows how a fairy tale like this works -- there is no delight without the risk of terror, and, in the final act of the film, the terror is fast and merciless, bearing an abundance of insect legs and skeletal faces, and suddenly the dilapidated mansion in the real world, with its quietly odd residents, starts seeming a lot more appealing.

I saw the movie in 3D, by the way, and you should too, even though it will cost a few more dollars. 3D is often a gimmick, but Selnick is as smart in his use of this technology as he is in everything else in the film, and, as a result, the sudden addition of depth to the movie immerses you further in the story, rather than distracting you from it.