LOS ANGELES -- In the land of make believe that is Hollywood, Teri Hatcher is best known as sexy cougar Susan Mayer on the hit series Desperate Housewives. Women giggle, men lust and geeks obsess over the length of her tresses and the curves of her full-figured body.

You might even dismiss her as a Hollywood lightweight ... until you meet her. Intelligent, articulate, morally focused and enormously concerned with good parenting, 44-year-old single mom Hatcher is a dynamo. Perfect, then, that animator Henry Selick -- collaborator on Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas -- chose Hatcher as the voice of Mother in his new movie, Coraline.

Actually, Hatcher voices three mothers: Real Mother, Other Mother and an unnamed Evil Mother who emerges when heroine Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is most vulnerable in this fantastical tale of neglect, enticement, fright, rescue and redemption.

Talking to Hatcher, both at a news conference and in a Sun Media interview, you sense how seriously she delved into her first animation project.

On landing a role in a Selick masterwork: "I've always wanted to be in an animated movie but I never dreamed I would able to be in this level of artistry."

On developing voices: "Interestingly enough, when you think about going into your first animated movie, you imagine you are going to pull out every accent you ever worked on as a child, and every silly cartoon voice you ever imagined making up." Instead, Selick asked for reality.

On developing her performances, first as Real Mother: "Everyone thinks you work on an animated movie and you just get to wear jeans and wear your hair in a ponytail -- which is true, and not bad. But, for me, I still kind of put my hair up in a frumpy way (and slumped her shoulders) so that I felt heavy and exhausted. The Other Mother was much more postured and mannered. So there still was a physicality to it, although you're not in front of a live camera."

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On introducing Evil Mother's creepy head tilt: "That might have been inspired by me but I don't want to take any credit for their beautiful artistry."

On any imagined connection between her Mothers and Desperate Housewives: "No, I think they're completely disconnected (characters). They are very different. I don't think I see or hear any Teri in the movie, and I don't think I hear any Susan, either, which I am really happy about."

On the subtext that makes Coraline a classic cautionary tale: "I think the movie shows us thematically that children can be lured away into something that is enticing and seems like it is going to be better, and seems like it is going to be the answer to everything, and ends up ultimately being very dangerous, if not entrapping."

On how children can rebel when their parents neglect them, often because of exhaustion: "I think that does happen in our society and you know all sorts of things -- the Internet, drugs, sex, all kinds of behaviour -- that can seem like the quick Band-aid to a child. Unless that parent and that kid can come together and repair that, then you've really got trouble in your family."

On how the sophisticated Coraline story works so well with the magic of stop-motion, 3-D animation: "It makes it a movie you can see over and over again. Not only are you appreciating the glorious visual detail, but you are getting that message -- those resonating, deep layers of message about family -- if you want to pay attention to it. Maybe it depends on the mood you're in. I wouldn't like to shove that down anyone's throat because sometimes people just want to go and be entertained."

On taking young children to Coraline, despite scary scenes, because it brings out primal things to discuss: "Kids, they feel alone, they feel ashamed, they feel jealousy, they feel anger, things that aren't necessarily comfortable to talk about. Whenever you have an opportunity to communicate with kids in an open and imaginative and humourous way -- which this movie provides -- (that is a good thing). I think that even if there are scary feelings that come up, the communication and the message in this movie makes it worth seeing."

bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca