To make a long story short and spolier free, ParaNorman is quite possibly the best animated movie since The Iron Giant, which, in turn, was the best animated movie sense Walt Disney died.
To make a long story full-length and partially spoiler free, but not entirely, read on, Dear Reader, and discover ParaNorman.
First, some background: ParaNorman is a stopmotion animated family horror comedy adventure movie produced by Oregon-based Laika Studios and distributed by Focus Features, the "art-house" subsidiary of NBC Universal, mostly famous for films like Lost in Translation and Brokeback Mountain. Stopmotion, in case you were wondering, is a method of animation that uses a series of still photos of a character or prop, making small movements between each frame, and then playing back the frames at a high speed, usually 12 frames per second for a lower budget picture and 24 for a Hollywood blockbuster (although many animators are moving to even higher frame-rates as digital editing allows).
Previous and recent popular installments in the genre include Wallace and Grommet, Chicken Run, A Nightmare Before Christmas (perhaps the best known among the pantheon of stopmotion films), and Coraline. Paranorman, in turn, feels like the spiritual successor to Nightmare and Coraline, as all three, even though the films are not directed by Tim Burton, all feel very Burtonesque. They capture the lighthearted-darkness that Burton popularized, as well as the gothic aesthetic and bizarre, original central characters surrounded by broadly painted archetypes that serve as sounding boards for said central character. (In Coraline, the central character is the stereotype and the surrounding cast are the freaks, but it creates the same effect.)
Paranorman doesn't settle for simply living up to the expectations set by its stellar predecessors, though. It surpasses each of them in its own way, jumping to the top of the list of movies this year, and will, I foresee, sit upon the list of greatest movies of all time.
I know that many of you are thinking:
Well, he's obviously just being reactionary! Surely something with trailers as lousy as this one could only be utter crap:
Well, most astute Reader, I must confess I felt the same when I first saw the trailer. The second T.V. spot was even worse. I won't subject you to its horror here, but this is a direct line from the second trailer: "An unlikely team will assemble: The Cheerleader, the Jock, the Bully, the Geek and... Norman!" It sounds like a joke, amiright?
Well, the marketers at Focus Features obviously wanted to fool parents in to bringing the youngin's to this one, as it is the post-blockbuster lull that always comes this time of year when there are virtually no good movies in theaters. The trailers make this seem like bottom-of-the-barrel pandering for the wee whipper-snappers; just some more cardboard cut-out "family" fare to give keep the kids quite for an hour and a half- all this in the hopes that the parents wouldn't fall asleep during the trailers so they would get a chance to witness the refreshing not-awful Paranorman.
Well, then. I see how it is. Have it your way:
REASONS PARANORMAN IS SO GOOD:
Reason the First: The animation itself is beautiful. Claymation characters have never looked so good on film. Yes, that includes Harryhausen's skeleton warriors for those of you who are nerdy enough to ask such a question. The directors and animators of Paranorman realize where the boundary is between using technology as a tool and finding new ways to abuse technology for the sake of making a more gimmicky picture. For instance, the movie was released in 3D (presumably because a new law was passed without anyone noticing that required all children's movies to be released in 3D), but none of the shots, save maybe one towards the end, ever feel or look like they're trying to throw the third dimension in our face. The film has a very strong respect for the sacred Fourth Wall in that regard. Furthermore, additive construction printing technology was used to generate the character's faces, which means that, although computers were used in the design of the tiny people, all of the photography for the shots were done through a camera lens and not a computer screen.
Reason the Second: Paranorman revitalizes the well-worn and threadbare metaphor of zombies. The walking dead, from their breakthrough into the cinematic mainstream thanks to George Romero and his ilk, have always been a poorly disguised representation of the people on earth who live in a hazy, half-living existence and act in a mob, following each other in circles with no leader, forming a hive-mind collective. Zombie hunters and survivors, by extension, depict US, as the audience, struggling to maintain individuality. After 50 years, though, the analogy became so used that it meant nothing anymore, and the only way a zombie film could come close to originality was if they mixed it up a little. Zombieland, for instance, uses the ghouls only as a pretext to bring together four people who already acted as though they were surviving a zombie apocalypse: A twenty year old Warcraft addict who treated other people as nuisances and threats trying to pry him from his artificial livelihood; a middle-aged man in denial about his own life and loss who looks at other living humans as constant reminders of the fragility of life when faced with adversity; two young women who are always looking out for themselves and look upon their fellow carbon-based life forms as sources of either fear, pain, or as a stepladder to bring themselves up at their expense. Paranorman shakes it up a little differently. I wouldn't dare tell you how for fear of spoiling the single best moment of the film, but I will give you one word (two, I suppose, but there's a hyphen in between them): role-reversal.
Reason the One After Second: The envelope containing the rules defining a "kid movie" is constantly being pushed, and there are thematic and visual symbols that the young target demographic and their parents alike will struggle to wrap their brains around. "Did they really just do that?" and "Wait, what? How?!" were the choruses that echoed among the teater I was in when I first saw the film. Nowadays, the rift between a G and PG rating is based almost entirely on visuals: how scary is this? How disturbing will that be? and so on and so forth. Paranorman, on the other hand, seems to have achieved its elevated Parental Guidance Suggested screen solely through the thematic content (although there are one or two moments of intense peril that might have contributed some.)
To quote a developmentally handicapped seafood entrepreneur on a bench with chocolates: "That's all I have to say about that." GO WATCH PARANORMAN. Feel free to send me as much hatemail as you like if it fails to live up to expectations, and try to lose all memory of the god-awful T.V. trailer before you enter the theater.
Stay tuned, true believers. And, until next time, ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
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