Four stars. Rating: PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang
Norman Babcock sees dead people. Constantly.
And he cheerfully chats with
them.
 |
| Meet the Babcock family: from left, Grandma, Mom, Dad, Norman and his teenage sister Courtney. You'll likely notice that Grandma seems somewhat ghostly; that's because she has been dead for years ... although this hasn't stopped her loving relationship with Norman. Nobody else in the family appreciates the boy's, ah, unusual gift. |
This unlikely talent has prompted
nothing but derision, dismay and the unwanted attention of the booger-picking
school bully. “Weird” kids always get singled out for abuse, and Norman is much
weirder than most.
He’s also the hero of ParaNorman, the newest stop-motion treat from animator Travis Knight’s Oregon-based
LAIKA Inc., which rose from the ashes of the financially strapped studio
founded by claymation pioneer Will Vinton. Although LAIKA had a hand in Tim
Burton’s Corpse Bride, the new company’s first wholly in-house feature was its
awesome 2009 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.
ParaNorman is LAIKA’s second big-screen
film, and the first written as an original concept by Chris Butler, who worked
on storyboards for both Corpse Bride and Coraline. Butler shares
directorial duties on this new movie with Sam Fell, whose previous credits
include co-helming Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux.
The story is funny, snarky,
occasionally scary — perhaps too much so for very young viewers — and
unexpectedly poignant at times. The voice casting is delicious, and the
93-minute film moves along at a lively, suspenseful pace.
And the animation is simply
smashing. Stop-motion is such a labor-intensive process; the mere completion of
such an ambitious project deserves applause. That it turned out so well is
icing on the cake.
The random bits of production
data are staggering. ParaNorman took two years to make, involving more than
320 designers, artists, animators and technicians. At any given time, these
people worked on 52 separate shooting units, representing the various settings
of this droll, macabre little tale. An entire week would be spent, carefully
manipulating these little puppets, to get between one and two minutes of
footage.
None of which would matter a jot,
of course, if we weren’t engaged by both the story and its characters.
We meet Norman (voiced by Kodi
Smit-McPhee) as he enjoys a televised horror movie in the company of his
beloved grandmother (Elaine Stritch). Only one problem here: Grandma has been
dead for years, a fact that exasperates Norman’s father (Jeff Garlin), deeply
concerns his mother (Leslie Mann), and flat-out disgusts his self-absorbed
older sister, Courtney (Anna Kendrick).
