Given the increasingly inexpensive and accessible software to create computer-generated animation, we should be thankful for artists like Henry Selick, who remains determinedly old-school and hands-on in his approach.

I’ve always championed animation as the purest form of movie-making, created frame-by-frame from the filmmaker’s imagination. Selick, in his new film, “Coraline,” takes that even further, crafting every frame literally by hand in his work as a stop-motion animator.

Based on a story by Neil Gaiman and shot in 3D, “Coraline” is a grass-is-greener tale about a girl whose name is always mispronounced (as Caroline). Voiced by Dakota Fanning, she’s a bored preteen whose parents, writers with a book due, have moved her into a creaky old apartment building in the middle of Nowhere, Ore. She has no one to play with other than a pesty local boy named Wybie.

Mostly Coraline spends her time complaining about her parents. They ignore her, make inedible meals and, when they do pay attention, they refuse her money for new clothes or toys. She tries to make friends with the other residents of the multi-occupant house called the Pink Palace, but can’t quite get their attention either. Upstairs lives Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), a retired Russian circus performer with his own show of trained mice. A pair of aging vaudevillian sisters (Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) live downstairs.

Then one night, just before she falls asleep, Coraline spots some of the trained mice – and follows them through a secret door in her living room that leads her to a tunnel and into a brighter, cheerier version of her own house. It’s like a better rendition of her life, populated by sunny copies of her parents, who are the same except for a crucial difference: They have buttons sewn where their eyes should be.

Otherwise, the “other” mom and dad are ideal. They live happy, colorful, well-fed lives and actually want to engage Coraline. It plays right into the notion every child has at some point – that he has been taken away from his “real” family, who would give him a different, better life if only he could find them. Unfortunately for Coraline, her excursions to this “other” family inevitably end with her falling asleep in her beautiful bedroom in the “other” house – and then awakening in her actual room in the gray, gloomy house she shares with her parents.

As happy a place as the other house is, however, there’s the matter of those button eyes – and a creepy, too-good-to-be-true vibe. Eventually, Coraline learns the secret – and has to fight for her real life and her real family.

Selick’s characters have an angular, cartoony quality, but without the perfect finish that CG characters possess. As skillfully as he manipulates them – the film was shot one frame at a time, with one or two minutes of footage completed each week – there are imperfect movements and surfaces that give it a rougher edge. Yet there’s a solidity and imagination to the action that is hard to resist.

While there’s whimsy and imagination, the humor may be too subtle for smaller children, who may be scared by a spidery monster that shows up at the end. It does get exciting – but the intensity of those scenes may be too much for younger viewers.

The voice cast is spot-on, from Fanning as the resourceful Coraline to Teri Hatcher, perfect as both her real and her other mom – and Ian McShane as the eccentric Mr. Bobinsky.

“Coraline” is an imaginative feast for the eyes, a modern fairy tale with visual wonders to spare. Handcrafted, obviously, means something special with a movie like this.

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