Chris Butler

Halfway through ParaNorman (2012), a schoolteacher has her class re-enact a witch's hanging in cardboard hats for a hall of proud parents. It is a scene about a town that has turned an old cruelty into a day out, and the film plays it for laughs and then lets the laugh go sour. We laughed out loud and then winced, because Chris Butler had done what most writers of children's films will not: he let the nasty thing stay nasty. A boy nobody believes, a town with a bad secret, a curse due at sundown; the bones are old, and he takes them seriously.

He came up through the drawing board rather than the page: character design and storyboards on The Tigger Movie (2000) and Corpse Bride (2005), then storyboard supervisor on Coraline (2009) at Laika, where he has done his best work. ParaNorman, co-directed with Sam Fell, was the breakthrough, and he has called it "John Carpenter meets John Hughes", which is exactly right. He wrote Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) with Marc Haimes and ran its story department, directed Missing Link (2019) on his own, and now has two scripts out in the same year: Wildwood (2026), back at Laika, and the live-action Masters of the Universe (2026).

Butler's films are nearly always about a boy trying to find where he fits, with something supernatural in the way, and he is at his best when the supernatural is frightening and the boy's trouble is real. ParaNorman borrows its slow shuffle and its screaming blonde from the drive-in and plays them straight, with Jon Brion's fairground organ wailing underneath. Kubo lets loss stand as something affection cannot simply remove, which is rarer in a family film than it should be, and it is the reason the adventure has any weight.

The trouble is the plot, and it is the same trouble every time. Once the dead are up, ParaNorman has too many people to move around, and there are three chases where one would do; Christopher Murrie cuts them briskly, but a chase is still a chase. Kubo's mythology gets harder to follow as it goes, and the film keeps telling us that stories matter until it sounds like a lesson. In both, the moral is said twice, and the second time we could feel the script checking that the children at the back had got it. Masters of the Universe, credited to four writers, has the opposite problem: each time a boy finding his purpose threatens to move us, a quip arrives to make sure it does not.

With Travis Knight, who directed both Kubo and Masters of the Universe, Butler has had a studio that let his monsters be monsters. His two good films say he should keep them frightening and keep the jokes at the edges. Wildwood takes him back to Laika and to a dense book to adapt. We would sooner see that than another joke about the outfit.