Before last week, my only exper­i­ence of mov­ing 3D came approx­im­ately 15 years ago, cour­tesy of the 3D glasses with red and green lenses taped to the cover of Live and Kick­ing magazine, which my whole fam­ily to viciously fought over to watch the 3D epis­ode of Live and Kick­ing one Sat­urday morn­ing. This was a morn­ing I remem­ber only as being some­what dis­ap­point­ing, although not as dis­ap­point­ing as the Scratch’n’Sniff epis­ode of Going Live, where everything appeared to smell of card­board. So as we sat down to watch Cor­aline 3D my expect­a­tions were pretty low, not least because the glasses were so big and uncom­fort­able on my abnor­mally small head that I felt like Brains from Thun­der­birds mak­ing a cameo appear­ance in Happy Days.

This isn’t a film review. No-one should be forced to sit through one of my film reviews, which com­prise mostly of ordered list items so pedantic that Al has evolved a part of his brain that switches off com­pletely as soon as he hears, “ONE!” But the 3D was amaz­ing: always subtle enough to enhance the scene without dis­tract­ing you com­pletely and always real­istic enough to make you for­get that this isn’t the way stop-motion films always feel, but adding enough to the screen­ing that I can’t ima­gine watch­ing the film in 2D is any­where nearly as enjoy­able. Frankly, I’m never watch­ing a film in 2D again and will be start­ing a peti­tion online to have Dot and the Kangaroo con­ver­ted to 3D as soon as is prac­tic­ally possible.

Dis­turb­ingly, Cor­aline appears to be being mar­keted as a children’s film – or at least I assume so, based on us being pretty much the only people in the screen­ing who knew the full alpha­bet and remembered the 1990s. I say dis­turb­ingly, because this is one creepy film. Per­haps the concept of some “other mother” try­ing to replace your eye­balls with but­tons is over­looked by people who haven’t mastered the art of try­ing their shoelaces, or per­haps the uneas­i­ness is pro­duced not by the story but by the feel­ings adults can pro­ject onto it, but at least three times dur­ing the film I looked around me and was really sur­prised that no-one was being marched out by a hor­ri­fied par­ent. Don’t have nightmares.

Lastly, if you go to see Cor­aline 3D — and you should unless you’re of a very nervous dis­pos­i­tion — don’t be one of those people who get up as soon as the cred­its start (not least because why do that? So you can get home fif­teen seconds earlier than every­one else?) – stick around for the cred­its, which have some of the nicest 3D in the film; I actu­ally ducked as a fly­ing dog made straight for my face, and if you’ve never had a dead dog fly at you then you’re just miss­ing out.