I've just come back from watching Laika's new 3D stop motion
animation picture ParaNorman. Yes, I even saw it in
3D - more on that later. Laika's last effort was 2009's Coraline, based on the Neil
Gaiman book of the same title. I enjoyed Coraline tremendously - I've been a Gaiman fan
since his uniquely creepy and literate take on the Vertigo comic Sandman and
I thought the trailer for ParaNorman looked
clever and fun. Then again, trailers aren't the movie, are they?
Luckily, this is a movie
well worth seeing. ParaNorman is a twist on the "weird
kid" movie. In this case, Norman Babcock has a talent he never asked
for - he can see and speak with the dead. It doesn't seem to be much of a
gift - he's considered a freak in his town of Blithe Hollow (nice name - a
combo of Blithe Spirit, the
Noel Coward comedy about the havoc the dead can wreak on the living and
Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow from the Headless Horseman tale) and even his
family doesn't understand him. About the only person he can confide in is
his grandmother, and she happens to be (you guessed it) dead. Through a
strange series of events - or maybe not so strange, considering the town's main
celebrity is a 300-year-old witch - the town must deal with the fallout of a curse no one really believed existed and non-normal Norman is the one best suited to bring the town back from the brink.
There's a lot in
here to like. The story is interesting, the characters are fun to watch,
and yes, there's even a lesson or two in here, especially about doing what's right even if you're scared and precisely how stupid scared people can be. I enjoyed
the vocal talent (a lot of new voices here) and there’s a lovely, almost
throwaway line that I wasn’t expecting from the jock character. Be on the lookout there – stereotypes are
broken.
 |
| Giant stop motion scorpions!! Ah, Harryhausen! |
Now let’s talk technique.
Stop motion animation is the catchall term for that painstaking process
of taking objects and moving them just a tiny bit, filming a single frame, then
moving the objects a tiny bit more, filming another single frame and so on until you
have an entire movie. It takes forever. You’ve seen this
if you’ve ever seen the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials (Claymation is a
specific type of stop motion using clay figures) such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus, but you’ve also seen it if you’ve
seen The Empire Strikes Back – look at
the AT-ATs invading Hoth, which was done with extremely detailed miniature
models. It’s a technique used in
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies (see #5 on this list) and
(sigh of contented reminiscence) Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and Clash of the
Titans flicks. (Harryhausen is so
instrumental to this school of animation that the Pixar movie Monsters Inc. has a tribute to him – Mike takes his girlfriend Celia to dinner at a restaurant called “Harryhausen’s.” It’s a nice nod.)
Here, stop motion is used in conjunction with
3D (Coraline was the first film to do
this all the way through). I thought the
animation was wonderful – there’s some especially nice rendering of hair, for
example – but if anything, ParaNorman
confirmed my distaste of 3D. While this
film uses 3D more to create depth than have things come flying out toward my
face, I still just don’t like it. It
doesn’t strengthen the story and I think it detracts from the telling of that
story. And seriously – it cost a hair
over $20 for two of us to see a matinee? (And that’s pre-popcorn.) Plus I can’t re-use the blasted glasses? No, thanks.
So the long and the short of it – go see ParaNorman, but don’t bother
with the 3D. And dig out your old, grainy Evil Dead tape.
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