As an adult, looking back on my childhood, the cinematic
moments that tend to stick with me the most are the ones in which I remember
feeling scared, uneasy or melancholy. Emotional responses, not unlike our sense
of smell, tend to stick with us longer than anything. That is why the best
children’s movies tap into the same fascination with thrill-seeking that adults
crave with hard-edged thrillers and horror films. While we might try and
protect our children from anything too evocative, kids kind of like to be
scared. With this in mind, Focus Features has utilized their animation
department for the sole purpose of making horror movies for minors, like
“Coraline”, “9”, and this year’s “ParaNorman”.
“ParaNorman”
is a strange film that celebrates the underdog and those of us who grew up
feeling outcast by our peers. The story follows the misadventures of Norman, a grade-school
boy in a small town, who likes to stay up late watching schlocky B-movies and
whose only friends happen to be dead. As you would expect, his family doesn’t
understand him and his classmates don’t like him. However, Neil, an overweight and easily
excitable loner, is looking for someone else like him, who isn’t well liked. What
brings them together is an omen of doom, a puritan-zombie outbreak and a
witch’s curse, brought about by the dark secrets hidden in the town’s history.
Like
“Coraline” and “Corps Bride”, this movie is filmed in the classic stop-motion
animation, with some necessary scenes accented with CGI. Unlike the usual
digital animation, stop-motion is a great technique for darker stories because
it brings a weight and uncanny quality to the plastic realities created. The
characters are all physically exaggerated and the sets are also made to looks
angular and otherworldly. When CGI does creep into the movie, it is integrated
so gracefully that you barely think about it, which is a good thing.
The
scares in “ParaNorman” aren’t as sharp as they were in “Coraline” and the
production design isn’t as innovative as it was in “9” but this movie still
successfully lulls you its own unique kind of charm. Though the plot is simple and
suspiciously similar to “The Sixth Sense”, even that seems to become a
non-issue once you begin to swing into the rhythm of the narrative and the secondary
characters begin to take center-stage. These characters, voiced by impressive young
talent like Kody Smit-McPhee, Anna Kendrick, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and
Casey Affleck, are all well intentionally cast, somewhat working against their
typical on-screen type.
Though
this movie isn’t going to win over everyone, the most interesting movies usually
don’t. Without a doubt, it will resonate with the kinds of kids who can
identify with the lonely perspective of the titular character. Many aspects of
this movie are geared toward the outsider and will therefore turn off those who
feel more comfortable in traditional animation. The design is stark and
sometimes hostile, the reveals are genuinely disturbing and the humor is oftentimes
dark and sophisticated. For me, these are all good things that work in the
movie’s favor. Though I would have liked to seen this released in October and
while it might take a few years to catch on, I would not be at all surprised to
see “ParaNorman” become a Halloween perennial, in the same way “The Nightmare
before Christmas” or “Hocus Pocus” has for some.
Grade: B+
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2012
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