ParaNorman

Or, 28 Decades Later.

ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart. 

Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.

I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.

Not that I'm complaining.

Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.

As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.

ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?

The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."

This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.

Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.

So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.

It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets. 

The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.