Coraline does meet one person her own age, Wybie (vb Robert Bailey Jr.), but she regards him as a stalker and thinks his cat (vb Keith David) is creepy.
Life changes for Coraline when she discovers a hidden passage within her new (to her) home that leads into an alternate universe. There, her parents are friendly and permissive instead of disinterested and unhelpful. Along with the wacky neighbors, the parents shower Coraline with amazing entertainment and luxury foods.
The promise of endless pleasure in the new world is tantalizing, but unsurprisingly, it turns out not to be real. Her mother in the alternate universe is actually a malevolent monster whom Coraline must combat to return herself and her actual parents to their former lives.
How others will see it. It is true that the director of Coraline, Henry Selick, also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), arguably the most popular and beloved stop-motion animation feature ever made. But he had lost much of his mojo after James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone, two comparatively underwhelming films.
But Coraline put Selick back on top. It was Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature and had a worldwide box office gross of nearly 200M. Today at imdb.com, it has nearly 300K user votes and a user rating of 7.8 out of 10, not far from The Nightmare Before Christmas totals of 400K and 7.9.
The user reviews nearly universally praise the movie, but warn that it is not for small children. This is due to its horror aspects, something it also has in common with The Nightmare Before Christmas.
How I felt about it. One could say that Coraline has a highly original story, relative to other animated films. True, it is based on a successful Neil Gaiman novella, but there are new characters and dialogue, and the art design is striking. Stop-motion animated features are generally better than their computer-generated counterparts; the first three Toy Story movies notwithstanding. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) is one of the better films from this century.
The story is familiar in that a prospective victim (Coraline) is lured by a new and seemingly better life, unaware that the new life is a mirage that will be ruthlessly yanked away as soon as the victim's value (in this case, her soul) is obtained.
The hoary cautionary tale, that the grass on the other side of the fence isn't greener after all, is made fresh by the ability of animation to create an amazing new world for Coraline, even if it is illusory and in fact is too good to be true.
Also too good to be true is Coraline's desire to rescue her parents from the clutches of her Other Mother, after they have neglected her in favor of their own interests for so long. The transformation of Coraline from slighted, aggrieved pre-teenager into a self-sacrificing hero is unconvincing, even though we have seem similar unlikely acts of child heroism in countless other movies, e.g. Home Alone (1990) and Labyrinth (1986).
We like both Coraline and Coraline better when the lead character has a resentful chip on her shoulder, instead of a desire to take out the all-powerful and murderous wasp-like monster.