Neil Gaiman may be best known for his landmark Sandman comics, but he's also written novels, television series, movies, and in 2003, an award-winning young adult novella called Coraline, which heads to the screen February 6.

The story follows an insatiably curious young girl named Coraline Jones, bored with the everyday world and ignored by her overworked parents. When she discovers a trapdoor in her room, she passes through it to find a mirror version of her own house, complete with an "Other Mother" and "Other Father," copies of her real parents who are more attentive, more interesting, more fun -- all the things Coraline has always wished they were. With one strange difference: they have large black buttons sewn over their eyes.

The house opens into a whole world where her neighbors have been transformed into bent versions of themselves, a world more colorful and grand than the one Coraline wants to escape. But under the color and strangeness, she starts to catch glimpses of something dark and rotten, too. The Other Mother offers to let Coraline stay in the strange, interesting new life forever, but to do so she'll have to sew buttons over her eyes, too. When she refuses and goes back to her boring reality, her parents have been kidnapped; her sweet, attentive Other Mother is actually a witch who's created the alternate world in order to steal children's souls.

The quest to save them involves a talking cat, a circus ringmaster, and an increasingly creepy Other Mother, a modern take on the old Baba Yaga fairy tales, with an evil old woman destroying children and a brave little girl fighting back.

The film adaptation uses gorgeous stop-motion animation, a painstaking, difficult style we haven't seen much of since Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. The trailers are astonishing, really capturing the world's beauty and its poisoned core, which should come as no surprise -- it's directed by Henry Selick, who also directed the seminal The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Adding both to the technical difficulty of the project and the immersive quality of the world, it will be the first stop-motion film shot stereoscopically, to be projected in 3D.

Dakota Fanning voices Coraline, with Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman (the PC in those Mac ads) as her parents. British comedians Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, who had a hugely popular TV series in the U.K., play two of her neighbors, along with Deadwood's Ian McShane, and Keith David as the nameless talking cat.

Gaiman and Selick both specialize in portraying childhood as a little darker than Disney's version, a little scary, a little weird, and where the idea that anything is possible means bad things too, sort of like how it really felt at the time. The magical and frightening visuals parallel the story perfectly, so if you like your fairy tales pitched a little grim (or Grimm), Coraline should be on your calendar.

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