Coraline

Locked in a dark closet by the Beldam as punishment, Coraline discovers three ghost children: a Victorian girl, a tall boy in 1920s sportswear, and a sweet ghost girl from a more recent decade. Each was lured through the door by the Beldam, had their eyes replaced with buttons, and had their soul consumed when the Beldam tired of pretending to love them. They explain the rules to Coraline: the Beldam needs Coraline's love, freely given, but she'll settle for taking it if forced. They beg her to find their three lost eye-stones, hidden somewhere in the Other world, so they can finally move on.

Coraline strikes a bargain with the Beldam: a game. If she can find the three ghost-eyes plus her own real parents, the Beldam must let them all go. If she fails, she stays forever and gets the buttons. The Beldam agrees, confident she will win — and rigs the Other world to decay around Coraline as Coraline searches, pieces of it disintegrating into white nothing the further she gets from the central illusion.

Using a triangular seeing-stone given by Miss Spink and Forcible, Coraline finds the three ghost-eyes scattered across collapsing set pieces: hidden inside the rotting hulk of Other Bobinsky, lodged in saltwater taffy on the decaying Spink-and-Forcible stage, and pulled from the chest of a monstrous spider-mannequin version of the Beldam's domain. Each retrieved eye-stone is the soul of one ghost child; each child whispers thanks and faint warnings. Coraline narrowly escapes each set-piece as the Other world peels itself away around her.

Coraline returns to confront the Beldam in the now-skeletal Other parlor. The Beldam has shed her last pretense and revealed her true form — a tall, gaunt insectoid figure with needle fingers, white as bone. Coraline tricks her by claiming to know where her real parents are hidden, then throws the talking cat into the Beldam's face during the distraction. As the cat tears at her, Coraline grabs the snowglobe containing her parents and the black key and dives back through the tunnel toward home. She slams the small door behind her and turns the key in the lock.

Coraline wakes in her own apartment to find her real parents safely returned, with no memory of having been gone. She intends to bury the black key in a well outside the house, drop it forever — but before she can, the Beldam's severed right hand crawls out of the small door, having reached through behind her. The skeletal hand pursues her across the property, intending to steal the key back and unlock the door from the other side. Wybie, who Coraline previously dismissed, arrives just in time on his bicycle to help. Together they crush the hand with a stone, drop it and the key into the well, and seal it under a heavy stone slab.

The film closes on a small garden party at the Pink Palace. The three ghost children are finally at peace, the tenants are more present and human, Coraline's parents are warmer and more attentive after their ordeal, and Wybie has been reframed as a friend. His grandmother arrives in the final beat: the Beldam, decades earlier, had also lured her twin sister through the door — the missing twin whose old button-eyed doll Wybie had been carrying. The threat is gone but the cost is acknowledged. The cat watches from a fence post, tail twitching, then vanishes.