Film Review: "ParaNorman" (2012).

"It's all fun and games until someone raises the dead" in Paranorman. This stop-motion animated dark fantasy comedy horror film directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, written by Butler, and produced by Laika. Norman Babcock never asked to see the ghosts of dead people in his daily life, but his strange inherited talent is now the only thing standing between the cursed town of Blithe Hollow and an all-out zombie apocalypse.

The idea of the film came from Butler, who, realizing that zombie films often contained a degree of social commentary, thought making such a movie for kids could help express the challenges kids face growing up. Rather than using traditional 3D format cameras, the film utilised sixty Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR cameras film the movie. The film was the first stop-motion film to utilise a 3D colour printer to create replacement faces for its puppets in a process called "Rapid Prototyping." Over thirty-one thousand individuals face parts were printed for the production. Replacement faces were used on puppets to allow a wider range of expressions for each character. Over two hundred and fifty unique faces were utilised for one character to create a single shot that lasted only twenty seven seconds on screen. Each replacement face was built from hundreds of layers of fine white powder in a 3D printer, a process that took about five or six hours to become ready to use on-set. Printing the faces took four 3D printers a combined total of five hundred and seventy two days of straight print time. It took at least three to four months to craft a new puppet from start to finish, not including design or testing time. Sixty puppet makers created sixty one characters made up of a hundred and seventy eight individual puppets, including twenty eight individual full body puppets for Norman alone. Norman had about eight thousand replacement faces with a range of individual brow and mouth pieces, giving Norman a range of approximately 1.5 million possible facial expressions. The biggest number of unique faces used in a single shot was five hundred and forty five, spread across seven different characters. The shot, near the end of the film, is 42.7 seconds (one thousand and twenty four frames) long and took over a month to shoot. On average, each animator shot about 4.38 seconds of film per day, which means it took an entire week of production to complete 12.78 minutes of footage.

The film features the voice talents of Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin, Elaine Stritch, Bernard Hill, Jodelle Ferland, Tempestt Bledsoe, Alex Borstein, and John Goodman. Solid performances were given by the talented cast that gave this unusual kids film a surprising twist.

With its vivid stop-motion animation combined with an imaginative story, ParaNorman is a film that's both visually stunning and wondrously entertaining. The film consistently lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

Simon says ParaNorman receives: