2012’s ParaNorman has an elementary school kid with a problem. Norman, as voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, sees dead people everywhere and can even converse with them. Throughout the film, I was thinking how that was going to make puberty even more difficult than it is for most people. Everybody sees some privacy in those years, if you know what I mean.
His interactions with the spirits are so mundane as to make it almost indistinguishable from conversing with the living. In the first scene, he’s watching a zombie movie as his grandmother sits on a sofa in the background, commenting how the undead are going to spoil their dinner if they go around eating brains. What we don’t know at first is his grandmother is long dead.
Norman’s seeming conversations with nobody is deeply frustrating to his parents (Jeff Garlin and Leslie Mann), and are an embarrassment to his older sister (Anna Kendrick). He is regarded as a freak at school, and heavily bullied.
A new, living friend arrives in the form of the pudgy and equally unpopular Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The difference from Normal is Neil is more affable and indifferent to the taunts from others. As he puts it: “It’s called survival of the thickest.” He also isn’t bothered by Norman’s abilities, and only curious to learn if he can see the ghost of his dog, which was ironically run over by a animal rescue van. Indeed, Norman can see the unfortunate ghost, which is separated into two independent sections, enabling him to sniff his own spectral backside as if it belongs to another dog.
Our protagonist is also starting to experience what appear to be visions of a future disaster. The seeds for this impending doom might have been planted by this small town’s founders, who once burned a witch at the stake.
There will also be zombies, and the nature of the undead here is interesting, as they find themselves to be more in danger from modern-day Americans than the living are from them. I wonder if the spirits could somehow go back in time and have a long talk with themselves when they were alive, to possibly reconsider the protections granted by the Second Amendment.
Despite a complete absence of musical numbers, I feel this film was only possible because of the slow acceptance into the mainstream of The Nightmare Before Christmas. There is some gross out humor, but it doesn’t extend much beyond the norms established by that film. The worst moments are when it resorts to lowest-common-denominator humor, such as the spirit of Norman’s freshly dead uncle travelling up through a toilet for no good reason.
If I found anything off-putting, it is the nature of the animation. It isn’t the quality of it, though I am loathe to praise the output of the studio now ran by the son of Nike’s founder after it was stolen from Will Vinton (for more about that, check out the documentary Claydream). Instead, it is the excessive smoothness, which had me wondering if there was some sort of computerized frame blending in use. Whatever was used here, it pushes the image into the uncanny valley.
All that said, I enjoyed ParaNorman more than I expected to. I can’t imagine it being a Halloween viewing staple in my household, though it is a film I believe would be well received by most viewers. At least I don’t recall any references to of-the-minute pop culture phenomena so, in addition to the lack of musical numbers, that chalks it up as a win in my book.
Dir: Chris Butler and Sam Fell
Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi and the glut of celebrity voices we’ve all come to expect from this kind of thing
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray