Masterfully made and beautifully constructed, ParaNorman is technically speaking, one extraordinary motion picture. It is next to impossible to not be drawn in to the painstakingly vivid and stunning world that the LAIKA Entertainment animators have designed once again for this follow up to their Oscar-nominated Coraline and Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride.
As intricate and intense as elements of Coraline turned out to be, ParaNorman is by its very nature equally unsettling, intriguing, and surprisingly funny. Writer and co-director Chris Butler, making his feature-length film debut in those roles, has a pulse on every beat present within his film. His screenplay, while admittedly thin at times, is buoyed by the visual landscape his animators have assembled. The performances Butler draws out of his vocal ensemble, along with his keen sense of timing and almost intuitive delivery of jokes, one-liners, and chills and scares is engagingly manipulative.
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Tags: Animation, Anna Kendrick, Chris Butler, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Kodi Smit-McPhee, LAIKA, Leslie Mann, ParaNorman, Sam Fell













