Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
It turns out that it’s not just Haley Joel Osment who sees dead people, as young Norman Babcock of the historically witchy-burny Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts also sees, and talks to the dead, most of whom talk back. Particularly his Gran, much to the rest of the family’s disbelief.
A disbelief shared by the whole town, that has seen Norman roundly labelled and bullied as “the weird kid”. To be fair, not entirely inaccurate. He does make one living friend, Neil, although he does seem to be more comfortable talking to the deceased members of town. There may, however, be a great deal more of them there dead people pretty soon, as we head into the 300 year anniversary of the town’s famous witch burning, if we are to believe Norman’s uncle, who says he’s been performing a yearly ritual to keep the witch’s curse at bay, but needs Norman to take over, on account of his imminent death.
Turns out we should indeed have believed him, as the dead rise from their grave, and the skies fill with something that, well, I’m reluctant to commit as to whether it’s a “wibbly thing” or a “swirly thing”. It’s up to Norman and his Scooby-Doo team of Neil, Neil’s elder brother, and Norman’s elder sister Courtney, and the school bully Alvin to work out a way to calm the storm, and, it turns out, the spirit of witch.
At the risk of spoiling this entire episode, there’s not a film we’ll talk about today that I didn’t like, and I very much enjoyed this revisit of ParaNorman. Given that it’s sort of the point of the podcast, I should point out my only real, slight knock against this film, is that the story is a touch on the slight side. It’s more than strong enough to maintain the film, so it’s almost not worth mentioning, but if you are watching this back to back with Coraline you may well find yourself missing the influence of the likes of a Neil Gaiman on the story.
Still, what’s there is very far from bad, and it’s augmented by a number of very funny jokes with great deliveries from the likes of Anna Kendrick, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Casey Affleck, and John Goodman, and there’s a few nice easter egg type gags and references to other horror films for fans of that garbage.
We spoke a little last episode about Aardman having a distinctive style almost to the point of sameness, which is a trap I think Laika do a solid job of avoiding. Needless to say, in common with all of Laika’s work it looks fantastic, and it’s a good jump in complexity and detail between this and their last film. And, at the risk of spoilers, you can pretty much say that about all of their films.
So, yes, a solidly enjoyable film, and even if it perhaps the least weighty of Laika’s outings, it’s a funny watch and well worth revisiting this Halloween.