Sam Fell and Chris Butler's ParaNorman is a gift, plain and simple. An ode to Italian horror films and zombie movies, ParaNorman is the rare film that manages to use genre tropes as a springboard not just for the subversion of audience expectations, but to tell a thought-provoking story that presents a tired moral in a new, compelling light. Here is a children's film with blood and venom in its veins that looks upon life with both thinly veiled cynicism and incessant hope. The film follows a young boy named Norman Babcock who lives in Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts. He has a not-so-secret gift: he can see and communicate with ghosts. Of course, he is brutally ostracized by his peers and his parents for his apparently outlandish behavior. But when he is tasked with performing a yearly ritual to calm the spirit of a terrible witch executed hundreds of years ago, he accidentally unleashes a terrible curse and a horde of the living dead upon the town. To recount what happens next is to rob prospective audiences of the film's genius. Suffice it to say that the film is emotionally exhausting, insidiously clever, and above all, brutally, brutally honest. Studio Laika's stop-motion animation has never been better. In fact, ParaNorman might represent the technique's current pinnacle. I constantly forgot that I was watching a film animated by sculptors and not by computer programmers. ParaNorman is the kind of film that I wish I could have grown up with. It has some very rough ideas and concepts for a children's film...and it is all the better for it. Children need films that will challenge them. And in that regard, ParaNorman is almost unparalleled.
9/10
I saw this movie when it was in the theaters with a friend, and I was blown away by the sheer brilliance that Paranorman delivered. I cried at the end and I laughed at the optimistic cynicism that the film portrayed. Paranorman also made me relieved that modern American animation is still ground-breaking and timeless despite being operated by computers. Everything that Laika has done tends to go outside of the box in both artistry and concept, and I pray that their future films will signal for a renaissance in honest animated films.
ReplyDeleteSame here! I can't wait for THE BOXTROLLS!
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