Laika’s stop-motion ghost story is handsome, funny and frightening in the right places, with a middle that runs in circles and a moral said twice too often. Stay for the last twenty minutes, which earn the rest.
Chris Butler and Sam Fell have made a stop-motion horror comedy for children that takes the horror seriously. The bones are old Hollywood: a boy nobody believes, a town with a bad secret, a curse due at sundown. Butler’s script wants to be a zombie film, a school comedy and a lesson about mobs, and for most of its 93 minutes it manages all three at once. It is good, often better than good, and it dawdles in the middle in ways a film this short should not.
The pleasure is in what Laika’s animators can do with their hands. Nelson Lowry designs Blithe Hollow as a town that has sold itself to its own gift shop: a witch on every sign, a witch on the water tower, a witch’s hat on the roof of the burger bar. Norman’s bedroom is wallpapered in zombie posters and his slippers have teeth. Tristan Oliver shoots it low and close, in bruised purples and the orange of streetlamps at dusk, with the focus so shallow that the backgrounds fall away as they would on a real set, because they are one. The puppets’ faces are swapped out frame by frame, so a mouth can twist further than plasticine has any right to.
Smit-McPhee gives Norman a flat, tired voice, a boy who has stopped expecting to be listened to, and it is the right choice; the jokes land because he never asks for them. Tucker Albrizzi’s Neil is the opposite, a cheerful lump who treats being bullied as weather, and their friendship is the best thing in the film. Anna Kendrick makes Courtney’s contempt for her brother sound like love with the volume turned down. Elaine Stritch, as the grandmother who has died and not moved out, has a handful of lines and takes every one home with her.
Butler and Fell know their horror. The film opens on a cheap zombie picture playing on the Babcocks’ television, and the shadows, the slow shuffle and the screaming blonde all come straight from the drive-in. Jon Brion’s score leans on a wailing electronic line and a fairground organ, the cheap frightening sounds of a Saturday matinee, and it is funnier for being played straight. The school pageant, in which Mrs. Henscher (Alex Borstein) has the children re-enact the hanging in cardboard hats for a hall of proud parents, made us laugh out loud and then wince. It is a nasty little scene about a town that has turned an old cruelty into a day out.
The middle sags. Once the dead are up and the town is running, Butler has too many people to move around: two families, Sheriff Hooper (Tempestt Bledsoe), a mob, a book, a grave, and a set of dead judges led by Bernard Hill’s Judge Hopkins. Christopher Murrie cuts the chases briskly, but a chase is still a chase, and there are three where one would do. The moral, that people lash out at what they do not understand, is said aloud more than once, and the second time we could feel the film checking that the children at the back had got it.
Then the last twenty minutes arrive and the film becomes something else. We will not describe the turn it takes with Aggie Prenderghast (Jodelle Ferland). What we can say is that the sky above Blithe Hollow tears open in a storm of crackling yellow light, the animation stops being a joke, and a PG certificate began to look to us like an optimistic estimate. We were frightened, properly, and then moved more than we had expected by a film that had spent an hour making gags about brains. It is worth the wait.
Coraline (2009), the studio’s first feature, was the tighter film: one house, one door, one bad mother. ParaNorman is friendlier and untidier, and it has the better ending. Watch it with children old enough to enjoy being scared, which is not the same as all children, and turn the lights down. It runs 93 minutes and carries a PG that we would read as a challenge rather than a promise.
