It’s the night of the living – or at least stop-action – dead
War of worlds has off-kilter gags
The Salem witch trials in 17th-century America were grim for the witches, but they were a gift to the literary community.
The most famous work to come out of them was Arthur Miller’s 1952 play, The Crucible, which used mass hysteria and religious extremism as symbols for 1950s Mccarthyism: the persecution of the independent by the power-mad.
The stop-motion animated film Paranorman isn’t exactly Arthur Miller — heck, it’s not even Coraline, the 2009 classic made by the same producers — but it has its charms if you can sort through the various animated zombies, witches and outraged townsfolk with flaming torches. Paranorman finds in the U.S. history of witch hunts a metaphor for a condition as perilous as the fear of communism: the lonely child drifting in a sea of bullies and baffled parents.
The result is a film that hedges its bets between comical mayhem and doeeyed pleas for understanding, a compromise that would have sent the monsters of Coraline into stop-motion tantrums.
But there is enough imagination here to keep younger audience members spellbound, and enough halft-errors to keep them alert, if not actually burying their faces in their hands.
Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-mcphee from The Road) is an 11-year-old boy living in Blithe Hollow, Mass., which hasa salem-like- history (town sign: “A good place to hang,” accompanied by a graphic of an executed witch). Like the kid in The Sixth Sense, Norman has been born with the dubious gift of seeing dead people, most frequently his late grandmother (Elaine Stritch, bringing the croak of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway to the party), with whom he sits watching zombie films on TV. “He’s going to ruin his dinner,” grandma’s ghost complains as the TV zombie chomps a victim.
Norman’s gifts anger and befuddle his parents (Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin) and make him the object of bullying at school, where he’s known as Abnorman. He sees another world, rendered in wispy strokes that make Paranorman an eccentric-looking project: rubbery animation (Norman has jug ears and hair that stands up in a permanent state of alarm) overlaid with digital special effects, and a slightly handmade look that gives even expert stop-motion its air of surrealism. When Norman sees the ghost of a friend’s dead dog that has been cut in half by a car, the dog runs around to sniff its own butt, a grace note — if you can call it that — of inexplicable wonderment.
The invisible world is closing in on Norman, however, and his bizarre and reclusive uncle Mr. Prenderghast (John Goodman), who shares Norman’s gift, tells him that he must stop a terrible curse. Three hundred years earlier, a little girl was hanged as a witch, and she has vowed to raise the dead on the anniversary.
Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell populate this gruesome fantasy with an astonishingly large cast of characters, especially given the intricacies of the stopmotion process. The school bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), Norman’s totally vacuous sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick), his chubby friend Neil (Tucker Albrizzi) and Neil’s muscular but brainless big brother Mitch (Casey Affleck) end up on a hair-raising chase through ancient graveyards, dodging green-faced zombies and rioting townsfolk who seemed doomed to repeat the mistakes of 1712. Can’t they see that the living dead are just people, albeit ones who are likely to spoil their dinners in repulsive ways?
As ParaNorman moves between worlds of the living and the dead, Butler’s screenplay begins to take on a zombielike tone itself, as if it were assembled rather than written: You fear some spare limbs might fall off at any moment. But it hangs together, helped by its off-kilter gags — Neil appears in the spooky moonlight wearing a hockey mask and asks Norman if he wants to play hockey — and its intricate craftsmanship. The living dead have never looked so good.