It's one thing being a mental case in front of your family, but not the whole freaking town!
When the Academy Award nominations were announced and I saw I was only one away from having all five Best Animated Feature nominees under my belt, I knew it was only a matter of time before I screened ParaNorman. All I had to do was wait patiently for my library to get it to me, which it finally did this week. One of three stop-motion films that were up for the Oscar (with The Pirates! Band of Misfits and Frankenweenie being the other two), ParaNorman emerged from Laika Entertainment, the same company that produced Coraline and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, so it's hardly surprising that it's about a boy who sees and talks to dead people. What is kind of amazing is that it managed to get a PG rating, what with all the zombie mayhem. (I guess as long as the violence is bloodless and nobody says any bad words, it's all good.)
ParaNorman's pedigree couldn't be better since it was directed by Sam Fell, co-director of Aardman's Flushed Away, and Chris Butler, who also penned the screenplay and previously worked as a storyboard artist on Corpse Bride and storyboard supervisor on Coraline. Set in the witch-centric town of Blithe Hollow (think Salem, Mass., only more commercialized), which is due to celebrate the 300th anniversary of its founding, the film opens with a scene from a cheesy zombie movie -- complete with retro '80s synth soundtrack courtesy of composer Jon Brion -- which the title character (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is watching with his late grandmother (Elaine Stritch). In short order we're introduced to the living members of his family -- reactionary father Jeff Garlin, supportive mother Leslie Mann, eye-rolling teenage sister Anna Kendrick -- and hear about the crazy uncle he apparently takes after. And when we meet his uncle (John Goodman), who has as many eccentricities as you can have without a prescription, which he has plenty of as well, it's easy to see why Norman is told not to have anything to do with him.
Norman hardly has it better at school, where he's branded a freak and bullied mercilessly by a real Neanderthal (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), but at least he has a fellow misfit, fat kid Tucker Albrizzi, to back him up, even if natural-born loner Norman is slow to accept his friendship. Then there's Albrizzi's jock older brother (Casey Affleck), whose wheels are needed when Norman is charged with lifting the curse that has been placed on their town. Unsurprisingly, that's much easier said than done, especially when seven of the town's founders get up and start shambling around, which causes the townspeople to panic, deftly illustrating the assertion of Young Frankenstein's Inspector Kemp that "a riot is an ugly thing." Of course, when you consider that the equivalent character in ParaNorman is the overzealous town sheriff (played by former Cosby kid Tempestt Bledsoe), there's little chance of heading that off.