Stop-motion is almost as old the cinema itself, yet here I am
again fascinated at a bunch of moving dolls and the convincing world created
around them.
In April it was Pirates!
Band of Misfits, a riotous family comedy and one of my favorite pictures of
the year, and here comes ParaNorman,
a stop-motion horror-comedy from the team at Laika Entertainment, the gloomy
dreamers who gave us Coraline several
years back.
Coraline was dark and
wonderful, but I think Laika — the Pixar of stop-motion? — has topped
themselves with ParaNorman, a tale of
a young boy who can see ghosts, which is a great skill to have when zombies start
clawing out of graves.
Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the runty weakling at his school.
His reputation of spacing out and talking to thin air do not help his
popularity. His one friend, Neil, a plumpy kid filled with optimism, is picked
on just as much, let him count the ways: "I'm fat. I have a lunchbox with
a kitten on it. I sweat when I walk too fast. I have Irritable Bowel
Syndrome." These poor kids.
The mood may sound ghastly, with fleshy zombies grunting for
"braaaaaiiinnssss" and
demonic witches and ghosts who spill out of toilets, but this is all shown as
silly light-hearted comedy. Norman
for instance, is a horror-film junkie whose room is festooned with memorabilia
from hackers, slashers and other fright-fest staples. It's all very whimsical,
never threatening or intense. A different film, maybe one with Tim Burton directing,
might have written him with more angst and creepier, but here Norman is a lovable, albeit eccentric, kid.
And his hair sticks straight up, like a Lincoln
top hat without the brim.
The movie begins with Norman, but as the zombies appear and
slowly start to disassemble the town, Norman enlists his sister, friend Neil,
Neil's buffed-out older brother and the school bully, an oafish twerp named
Alvin — or is Alven, Allven or Alvun? This dim bulb isn't sure of the spelling
of his own name. I liked Alvin .
At one point we see him doing a B-boy
street routine that is epic in its awfulness. I
have not yet tired of the formula of Goonies,
E.T. and Super 8, where a bunch of plucky kids band together to bounce
through an adventure story. The movie joins a fun tradition of adventurous
young people.
ParaNorman has many
splendid scenes involving chasing zombies, spectral hallucinations and that big
first reveal of all of Norman 's
ghostly buddies, including a bird strangled with six-pack plastic rings, a
mangled piece of roadkill and a wiseguy wearing cement boots. My favorite
parts, though, were the comedy bits, including one scene involving a potential
zombie victim who can't decide if he should flee in terror or wait for a bag of
Greasy Pieces chips to cycle through the vending machine in front of him. In
another scene, Norman
can't remove a book from the clutches of a dead man's hands. Watch as he bangs,
smashes and contorts the body around to wrangle the book free. It may be
slapstick, but it's very sharp and the timing is perfect.
I also admired the bizarre design of the world and the
characters. Notice how nothing in the movie's universe is squared up or
straight. Door frames, vending machines, graveyard headstones, cars …
everything is made using odd angles and lines that wander. I especially liked Norman 's dad's
wood-paneled station wagon, which deserves to go down in history alongside the
Griswold's Family Sports Truckster. The human designs are even stranger with
ears that stick out, faces that seem almost deformed and waists that don't
match body styles. Norman 's
sister is especially odd, with a tiny top but with wide lower half (I think they call these birthing hips). All of it
together gives the film an interesting look and a bizarre visual appeal.
ParaNorman is a
fantastically enjoyable movie, but think twice before you bring your very little
ones. Much of the humor is not very friendly for the Playskool crowd. In the
first five minutes someone asks Norman
what he's watching on television. "Sex and violence," he replies
back. Other jokes include adult video stores, freeze-framing aerobics videos,
male boobs and then, of course, flesh-rotted dead bodies and a rather
terrifying grand finale with a witch made of yellow electricity.
I've said it before in other reviews and I'll say it again: it
may be a children's movie but I'll take an endlessly creative stop-motion movie
like ParaNorman over any
gunfight-fistfight-mayhem-inducing action movie any day of the week. This is an
entirely unique movie made with love and commitment by talented movie artisans.
If you would rather see more remakes, sequels, prequels and reboots of mindless
action films, then Hollywood
has you covered.
But don't forget about movies like this that aspire to be
something different instead of more of the same.
As with all stop-motion animated films, I'm posting all the photos. Click the jump to see more.
