Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a young girl who discovers a mysterious door in her new home that leads to an alternate world in the film Coraline. (Focus Features Films)

When the doll’s innards had been poured out like sand floating into space, and the gigantic, undulating grasshopper had been ridden by the little girl with the blue hair; and a needle jutted straight from the screen to within an inch of my eye in glorious 3-D, I remembered what I sometimes forget: that movies are capable of a breadth of imagination and fancy that no other medium can match.

Coraline is terrifying as well as thrilling, but the story never quite lives up to its potential as a satisfying modern-day variation on the Brothers Grimm.

Coraline possesses a rare, breathtaking wonder — visually, anyway. This fairy tale is told through the stop-motion animation of Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) — essentially a genius puppeteer — with some effects pushing right off the screen in 3-D (not available at all theatres, but worth seeking out). The handmade look proves terrifying as well as thrilling; this is a movie about kids, but it’s not really for little kids. And yet the story never quite lives up to its potential as a truly satisfying modern-day variation on the Brothers Grimm. While it socks you in the eye, your heart remains mostly untouched.

The film is adapted from the young adult novella by Neil Gaiman, who created the Sandman comics. Coraline is a smart, slightly sassy little girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) whose parents move her from Michigan to a rambling boarding house high on a hill in a small town far, far away. Mom (Teri Hatcher) and dad (John Hodgman) are 21st-century neglectors, workaholic gardening journalists (yes, this is a fairy tale) who mumble at their daughter as their fingers fly over the computer keyboards, never meeting her eye. The age-old message of the folktale — listen to your children — is the same, but with cell phones.

Dad is mostly just befuddled, but the mother-daughter war is on: mom can’t do right by her kid, whether it’s her unwillingness to buy Coraline the striped gloves she desperately wants or her inability to keep food on the shelves. (She’s a writer on deadline! Give her a break!) Evil stepmother, move aside; here comes the evil working mother, an archetype that ends up being cleverly tweaked.

Lonely Coraline discovers a small door in her new house and crawls through the pulsing umbilical chord inside. She emerges into her own life, minus all the stuff that makes it suck. In a much nicer kitchen, her Other Mother (also Teri Hatcher) is cooking away. She’s a lipstick-wearing domestic goddess whose only job seems to be serving her daughter, Martha Stewart-style. True, there might be unsettling black buttons sewn over her eye sockets, but you can’t have everything.

In the alternate reality, Coraline's mother (voiced by Teri Hatcher) has black buttons sewn over her eyes. (Focus Features Films)

Dinner through the looking glass is devoid of real-world kale and filled with roast chicken, potatoes and a literal gravy train chugging across the table. How about washing down that cupcake with some candy? The other side is a world alight with magic, where parents are playmates and sitting on a couch means curling up on a friendly bug.

The inversion seems to affect everyone: downstairs neighbours Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, better known as British comedy duo French and Saunders), aging vaudevillians who taxidermy dead Scotties for fun, show up, but with button eyes. They perform a bawdy number and in one poignant image, unzip their old bodies to return to their youth, a trick that puts Botox to shame. In the alternate reality, Mr. Bobinksy (Ian McShane), an eight-foot tall Russian circus performer who lives upstairs, is less creepy and more successful at rousing his mice to perform. But every morning, Coraline wakes in her plain old bedroom with its boxes half unpacked and her averageness confirmed.

It doesn’t take long for the reality of the unreality to kick in and Coraline discovers the dark side of perfection: Control Freak Mom. The whimsy grows darker and the film shape-shifts into something quite disturbing, playing with the primal terrors of dead children and missing parents. In the book, Coraline turns savvy detective, but in the film, she is not quite as fierce, and too often runs screaming from one tableau to the next, eyes closed. Perhaps Selick was so distracted in his lab somewhere — even though it doesn’t work this way, isn’t it cool to think of him as some kind of mad scientist in a lair, moving each tiny mouse foot, one at a time? — that he didn’t notice that the story gets undertold.

Coraline is likeable, but she doesn’t rise to the extraordinary heights that her circumstances demand. Her most dramatic, kick-ass moment is co-opted by a little boy, Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.), a tacked-on character who wasn’t in the book but whose presence dilutes Coraline’s strength. It’s her isolation that forces her to heroism — so what’s with the sidekick?

Perhaps it’s quibbling to want a narrative as beautiful and passionate as the imagery, because when it comes to imagery, Selick is nearly unparalleled; he’s the David Lynch of kids movies. Just don’t take the kids.

Coraline opens Feb. 6.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.