Neil Gaiman's popular childrens’ book, Coraline, the tale of a girl who goes through a door into a parallel but creepified world, has been brought to the big screen by Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick. It’s a great convergence of talents, with the lurid blackness of Selick’s stop-motion animation giving form to Gaiman’s twisted vision. That said, the story has acquired a more stridently moralizing tone under Selick: the emphasis is on growing up and forsaking childish dreams; about being realistic in what you expect from life and your parents. In the process, some of the excitement of the book’s celebration of independence, guts and curiosity is lost.

And Selick departs from Gaiman in stressing the importance of friendship, introducing a new character, a boy, to befriend the determinedly independent, sassy Coraline (the brilliantly attitudinal Dakota Fanning). He is utterly irrelevant to the storyline, so one has to suspect that someone decided no boy would sit through a film without a boy in it; this, surely, does a great disservice to boys in doubting their powers of imagination and empathy (did only girls read the book?) and, for girls, takes something away from this rare event of a genuinely interesting, feisty heroine. What’s more, it means that the defeat of the Other Mother now rests on the powers of friendship rather than cleverness and bravery, which makes for a far less satisfying ending.

Carping aside, this is a fantastic kids’ movie, making the competition seem flimsy in comparison, and is confident enough to resist slipping in knowing jokes for the adults. Visually, it’s ridiculous fun, with styling that careers into grotesquerie – long necks and distorted bodies and an evil stretched-out Other Mother who actually does look scarily like Teri Hatcher, who voices her. Stop-motion animation seems fitting for a tale about puppets and moulding a reality, and is an expressive, emphatic medium, its impact pushed further by use of 3D, which here is restrained, giving depth and life to the scenes rather than shooting rabbits out over your head all the time (though fast-moving foreground images often become rather indistinct). There are some fantastical set pieces – a mouse circus with canons that fire candy floss and a mechanical chicken that craps popcorn, a garden that unfurls and blossoms as Coraline walks through it and arranges its Jack O’Lantern fountains and tickling dragon snappers and frogs in flowers into a picture of her face – and some great, surreal little flourishes, like the spinsters in the basement with their Scotty dogs which they stuff and dress in angel wing jackets and mount on the wall when they die; on one of Coraline’s visits, they explain that they’re fitting one of their (still living) dogs with his wings as he’s been a bit off-colour recently.

For all its technical flair, at heart this is a properly dark, disturbing fairytale, and has a sense of timelessness rare in big-budget childrens’ films. It also has terrifying button eyes, so fulfilling the criteria for any genuinely great children’s book or film: that it can be used by parents to scare their kids into quiescence for untold years to come.