Previewing extended chunks of footage from any upcoming, hotly anticipated film is always risky business. Show someone a five-minute trailer and, if they’re honest, they’ll admit they can’t really judge the quality of the overall movie, no matter how many money shots are packed into those scant minutes. But show them twenty to thirty minutes, and it’s a different story. They get a real taste – a sense of the film’s pacing, its rhythms. Then they start making assumptions.

To wit – a friend of mine sat through twenty-five minutes of Spider-Man 3 on the Sony lot a few years back, and came away confident it would not just match but transcend Spider-Man 2. It was, he’d decided, the best thing since sliced Jesus bread. And don’t even get me started on the number of times I’ve been burnt at Comic-Con over the years. Nevertheless, I accepted Focus Features’ invite to watch a half hour of its upcoming 3D stop-motion-animated feature Coraline – based on Neil Gaiman’s children’s bestseller – this evening. (To be honest, Focus sent me a miniature pumpkin with the Coraline logo emblazoned on it for Halloween a few days ago – and it probably cost them twenty times more to ship than it did to purchase the little orange bugger. Attending was the least I could do!) So how was the footage? Although next year I may kick myself yet again for typing these words… what I saw tonight looked damn promising.

I’d seen bits of Coraline on a visit to the film’s set last spring, and they were certainly intriguing. But tonight’s footage revealed much more of the actual storytelling that director Henry Selick is employing in adapting Gaiman’s novella, which was, as I recall, a quick if enjoyable read when I inhaled it a few years ago. Selick appears to have retained the outline of the book while fleshing out the characters in a way necessary to fill two hours. Yes, those characters – now creatures of squash and stretch – are cartoonish in comparison to their original versions, but the world they inhabit is no less creepy. And to make it so was, I daresay, a bigger challenge for Selick than Gaiman – as the former works in a medium best known for funny animals and rollicking musical numbers.

Selick was in attendance tonight, joined by producer Bill Mechanic, a few members of his crew, and an assortment of the stop-motion armature models used in the production. But the director was the elephant in the room, since he’s helmed what remains the most impressive feature-length stop-motion spectacle to date – The Nightmare before Christmas. (No, Virginia, Tim Burton did not direct it.) And if Billy Friedkin gets a free lifetime pass for The Exorcist and The French Connection, Selick deserves at least as much for directing Nightmare and its underrated follow-up James and the Giant Peach. The team chatted afterwards to an audience of mostly local animation students. And the fact that these students – no-nonsense New York college students – saw fit to praise Selick for a number of technical details and subtleties that little old layman me missed, made as strong a case for Coraline as the footage I was able to digest.

What I saw consisted, more or less, of two extended sequences, each roughly fifteen minutes in length. If you don’t mind tons of spoilers, read on for a complete description of these sequences…

Sequence 1

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) has breakfast (or lunch) with her parents (voiced by the hapless Mr. PC himself, John Hodgman, and uber-MILF Teri Hatcher). They send her to their upstairs neighbor, Mr. Bobinski, an eccentric old Russian man, to give him his mail. After she arrives, he tells her of his mouse circus and the difficulties he’s having with his performers, all the while mispronouncing her name “Caroline”. And he gives her a message from his pet mice – “Don’t go through the little door.”

Coraline proceeds to her downstairs neighbors’ apartment. As she descends their staircase, a light fog follows her. Her downstairs neighbors are Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two English burlesque performers (voiced by comedians Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous), more than a little past their prime. They show Coraline their collection of stuffed Scotty dogs (apparently they can’t bear to say good bye to their expired pets). Spink offers Coraline some tea, and reads her fortune in the tea leaves. They see a peculiar, gnarled hand.

Coraline says goodbye to the ladies and goes outside once more. The fog has thickened. She runs into the goofball boy next door (a character not in the book), with whom she has a love-hate relationship. He jokes around for a little while, and mentions his grandmother’s twin sister, who disappeared years ago.

Note: The lighting and colors are nicely done in these scenes, employing a palette that’s pretty understated for an animated film. And the fog is oddly reminiscent of something you’d find in a Hammer horror film.        

That night, Coraline goes to bed, after setting a mousetrap. A mouse does come by, and steals the cheese she’s left. She follows it as it scurries down the little door Bobinski warned her about. She winds up in a kitchen much like her own. Apparently, she’s been here before – for she’s greeted warmly by her “other mother,” a button-eyed doppelganger, who thanks her for the cheese. She sends Coraline out to the garden to find her father. The garden is an eerily beautiful, wildly colorful reflection of her real parents barren backyard, with fruit and vegetables from pumpkins to roses blooming at every turn. She finds her father, who’s driving some sort of crazy flying tractor. He picks her up, flies over the garden with her and shows her he’s landscaped it so the entire plot is an aerial portrait of her.

Once back in her other mother’s living room, she meets the “other” boy next door, who’s had his voice removed by the other mother. Coraline considers this an improvement. She joins him in visiting the “other” Bobinski, and discovers the mouse circus he told her about, in all its Busby Berkely-choreographed glory.         

Coraline goes to sleep in her “other bedroom,” and wakes up in her real one, which is significantly drab by comparison.

Sequence 2

Coraline enters a huge theater in the “other” world. Almost every seat is occupied by a Scotty dog, except one in the front row next to the other boy next door. She sits down and a show begins. It’s a surreal musical number, performed by the garishly overweight and scantily clad “other” Spink and Forcible, dressed as a mermaid and Botticelli’s Venus. Midway through their number, they “strip” out of their fat suits, revealing two slender young women, button-eyed, like everyone else in the other world, and garbed in salt-water-taffy colored old-fashioned swimsuits. They perform a trapeze act, while reciting Shakespeare, and draft Coraline into the act, eventually bringing down the house with their breathless enthusiasm.

After the show, Coraline returns to her other parents, and tells them what a good time she’s having in their world. Her other mother says she can stay with them, if she’ll do one tiny thing – let her replace Coraline’s eyes with a pair of buttons, of any color she’d like.  

Coraline races to bed. Hoping to awake in her own room again. Unable to sleep, she goes downstairs and finds her other father palying the piano. He begins telling her the truth about her other mother, but is quickly silenced by the wires of his piano.

Eventually, Coraline finds a black cat, who alone can move back and forth between the worlds at will. He serves as her guide and protector in the other world.

But the last scene shows Coraline alone entering her other mother’s lair – a living room filled with pastel-colored, brightly-glowing insect furniture (continuing the surreal garden theme introduced earlier). Her other mother offers her some chocolate beetles, and, when Coraline refuses, she locks her in a closet. In which Coraline finds…

A title card flashed on screen – Coraline – In Theaters February 2009.

Yes, it looks to be about as creepy an animated film as I’ve ever seen. (I haven't even touched on the 3D, which, for once, isn't the least bit distracting and only enhances the surrealism.) But the thing most striking about Coraline is that it looks to do what only the best kids’ (or grown-ups’) fright films can – not just tell the story of a nightmare, but convince the viewer they’re actually having one. And if the quality of the remaining sixty minutes comes close to the thirty I saw tonight, then we’ve got the next truly classic animated film on our hands. We’ll know in February.