Paranorman (2012)

I’ve been working hard on watching all those unseen movies..but I did end up getting this one at a decent price recently at Walmart.  This one had a lot of positive reviews last year and being made from the same company as one of my favorite animations, I had to check it out right away!

Director: Chris Butler & Sam Fell

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin

Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lives in a little town called Blithe Hollow.  He is a bit of an outcast and everyone thinks his weird because he talks to empty space.  However, the real deal is that he can see and talk to ghosts.  Some ghosts stay around because they have unresolved business and he can talk to them and get along with them even better than with live people around him.  At home, his parents especially dad (Jeff Garlin) doesn’t believe these things and just wants him to normal and cut out all the pretending that grandma is still alive. At school, he gets bullied by  a guy called Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse).  As much as he learns to ignore everyone and just be alone, a little chubby boy, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), who also gets bullied wants to be his friend.  He gets approached by his uncle’s ghost to go look for a book to read the story in order to stop the witch from rising from the dead, however, he is too late. Along with his sister Courtney, Neil and his brother Mitch(Casey Affleck)and Alvin, Norman goes to find a way to stop the witch and the undead from destroying his town.  To do this, he has to figure out where the witch was buried and the get the whole story.

Paranorman is a stop motion comedy thriller animation with zombies and ghosts.  However, its not very scary.  Its done by the same company who put out Coraline.  Coraline is one of my absolute favorite animations.  It was creepy but fun to watch, mixed with a bit of humor.  I really looked forward to Paranorman for those exact reasons.  This one was pretty fun.  It was suitable for kids because the ghosts and the undead aren’t too scary looking but then it got the message around.  Maybe a few jumps here and there.  It was some fun witty humor matched with a pretty well-written story.  I loved it! Maybe not as much as Coraline, but this one is less tense, its much  more awesome family fun.

This whole animation was done very beautifully.  The visuals were outstanding from the backgrounds to the ghosts, the animated sceneries.  The characters were designed very well.  It focused on not only the adventure and mystery of saving the town from ghosts and zombies, but featured the family element of bond, understand, and support for each other, brings in hints of friendship and of course, the biggest issue was about bullying.

Norman was a pretty cool character.  I loved how he was stubborn about his own beliefs.  I may never have met any kid that can talk to ghosts but he has some believable aspects.  One of my favorite characters has to be Neil.  He was hilarious. He had some of the best dialogue that would just crack me up. The voices were done very well and it was just an extremely entertaining movie in general.

Wonderfully animated, funny characters, some ghosts and zombies with an evil witch, this movie had it all for me to pull it out at Halloween (or even before that) to watch again. I definitely recommend it 🙂