Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi
Directed by Chris Butler, Sam Fell
When Laika, an upstart stop-motion animation studio, created their first feature a few years back, they made certain that they had a solid foundation in place by adapting Neil Gaimans award-winning novel, Coraline. This follow-up sees the studio continuing in the same creepy vein but its spawned from an original script from debut screenwriter Chris Butler (who shared directing duties with Sam Fell). And while ParaNormans 3D animation is consistently charming and inventive, its story is as rickety as the skeletal zombies that populate the film.
The early scenes of Butler and Fells film serve to familiarize us with tweenaged Normans (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) unhealthy fixation with the undead. When not watching horror flicks, hes wandering around his hometown of Blithe Hollow, offering salutations to disembodied spirits that only he can see. Learning of the witchs curse thats destined to unleash supernatural mayhem onto the sleepy towns streets, Norman and his best friend (Tucker Albrizzi) assemble a Scooby Doo-style team of ghostbusters and race against the clock to keep all hell from breaking loose.
Of course, as the pint-sized horror freak encounters a more corporeal strain of the undead, he learns that things arent always as cut-and-dried as they are in his favourite good vs. evil gore fests. In revealing the truth behind the curse, Butler and Fell steer their farcical film into more serious read: sermonizing territory. Unfortunately, its graceless anti-bullying message is a little tough to swallow considering the tame gags weve had shoved down our throats up to that point. Consequently, this oddball confection leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste.
