Eleven-year-old Coraline Jones and her parents, Charlie and Mel, move from Pontiac, Michigan, into the Pink Palace Apartments, an old Victorian house in Ashland, Oregon. While searching for an old well, she meets a mysterious black cat and Wyborn "Wybie" Lovat, the landlady's grandson, who gives her a lookalike rag doll. Since her parents are too busy completing a gardening catalog, Coraline decides to explore the house, discovering a small door in the living room with a brick wall behind it. That night, she finds that the brick wall has been replaced by a tunnel, which leads her to the Other World, an alternate universe where her parents' button-eyed doppelgängers lavish her with food and their attention. Upon waking in the morning, Coraline finds herself back in the real world. She meets her other neighbors: Mr. Bobinsky, an eccentric Russian liquidator-turned-gymnast who owns a mouse circus, and retired burlesque performers April Spink and Miriam Forcible. Bobinsky and Spink warn Coraline about the Other World, and Wybie tells her about how his grandmother's twin sister disappeared when they were children.