Usually, 3-D technology is hopelessly cumbersome, with awkwardly fitting cardboard glasses and lenses that cast everything in a blurry, disgustingly brown-and-green-hued mess. It’s like having cataracts for two hours.

Animator Henry Selick’s Coraline is the first film in recent memory that uses 3-D to its advantage, rather than as an annoying gimmick. Most of the credit is due to the new RealD technology, an improved form of 3-D with sharper colours and focus, and comfortable, Ray-Ban-like glasses, but it also helps that Coraline is a great movie first, and a 3-D movie second.

Based on the Neil Gaiman novel, Coraline is an Alice in Wonderland-themed fable, with the young heroine of the title getting lost in an alternate universe. After moving with her family to a creaky old house in the woods, young Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) starts going stir crazy — her academic parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are consumed by their work, and have no time for her. One evening, she’s awakened by a noise downstairs. She notices a tiny door in the living room, which leads to a house much like her own. Her parents in this world shower her with gifts and treats. It’s wonderful. Except, she notices, everyone in this world has buttons for eyes and is curiously scared of her mother.

Fans of Gaiman will enjoy the author’s telltale Gothic quirkiness, but the real star of the film is director Selick, known to fans as the designer, animator and director behind The Nightmare Before Christmas. Coraline’s character designs are in the same vein (somewhere between Charles Addams and Playmobil), and the more grotesque characters (including one with sharp needles for hands) are gorgeously rendered.

Selick uses the film’s 3-D effects to draw his characters out, rather than have them dully sit as if in a diorama, with other effects creeping and flying about. The film features a number of amazing sequences, two of which (a mouse circus and giant spider’s web) are worth the price of admission alone. (That said, apparently, 3-D films are charging viewers around an extra $3 per ticket as a “technology fee.”)

If there’s any fault in the film, it’s the noticeable absence of Danny Elfman’s music, which greatly added to Nightmare’s creepiness. The score by Bruno Coulais, with additional music by They Might Be Giants, is adequate, but its cheesy French pop music overtones often prove distracting. Still, Coraline is fantastic, with one word of warning: though aimed towards the kiddies, it might prove too scary for some little ones.