Coraline Captures Imagination

I'm not certain why, but it seems like many successful authors have at least one book directed to children or at least a younger audience than their usual fans. Stephen King had "Eye of the Dragon" and Neil Gaiman has "Coraline." For Clive Barker, it was the haunting tale "The Thief of Always."
Each of these stories has had its own lesson, a moral or fable almost, along with the superior storytelling of the respective author. Two of them, Barker and Gaiman, expound on a theme started with Washington irving and "Rip Van Winkle" adding just a perfect twist to update the story.
Coraline is stop motion animation about a girl and her parents who move into an apartment complex with eccentric neighbors and a hole in the wall that leads to another world. Coraline is consistently ignored by her overly busy parents and begins exploring the other world where her other mother and other father dote on her every whim, make her scrumptious meals and have button eyes, much like the Coraline rag doll she received as a gift the day she moved in.
When the other worldly inhabitants of her neighborhood manage to get her name right and pay attention to Coraline, she is tempted to join the other world permanently, but the thought of replacing her eyes with buttons is enough to send her fleeing back to the real world. That's only the beginning of Coraline's adventure to right old wrongs and reunite with her family.
All in all, it's an adorable story with a fantastical other world as Gaiman is so fond of creating. Having never seen a Neil Gaiman movie that I didn't like, my love of Coraline was no surprise, but the fantastical other world is something like a Tim Burton movie and that made me enjoy it even more.
Coraline is a wonderful and slightly scary story for younger children, but with the great art and age-old story is a joy for adults as well.