One of my all-time favourite books is Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Granted, it's a children's book - or it's supposed to be, though I had nightmares as an adult about button-eyed monsters - but it's a beautifully crafted, intriguing story. Even better, Dave McKean provided the illustration: angular, scratchy drawings which made my skin crawl with the thought of that hand. When the film came out in 2009, I was pleased to find that Henry Selick's stop motion adaptation retained all the vibrancy, the creepy magic and genuine fright of the book, with a few changes here and there expected when turning words into pictures. It's become a film I can always go back to, drawn again and again into the fantastic detail: there was even a crew member to knit tiny clothes for the characters. I particularly love the contrasting colour palettes for the 'real' world and the 'other' world, chosen by the film's concept artist, illustrator Tadahiro Uesugi.
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