Zombie fun for the whole family!

By Walter J. Lyng, August 15th, 2012

If your only memories of stop-motion animation consist of old Christmas specials or California Raisin commercials, you'd better brace yourself for Paranorman. The second feature film from burgeoning animation studio Laika, who last produced the decidedly creepy Coraline, Paranorman had its Canadian premier last week, closing the Fantasia International Film Festival before opening in wide release on Friday, August 17.
Blending the very old-school techniques of stop-motion with the latest in computer-generated image technology, the film centers around an 11 year old named Norman, blessed/cursed with the ability of being able to speak with the dead. Pushing the boundaries of aesthetics as well as what traditionally constitutes as family entertainment, Paranorman stands to be quite the little game changer.
Before introducing their film at Fantasia, co-directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell spoke to The Suburban about the project that has been in one stage of development or another for the better part of two decades.
“The trick is to set the parameters very clearly and say 'Look, we're making a family film,' and then not actually do it,” says Butler, who also wrote the film. “There's a lot of elements to this story that aren't quite what they seem. It's about not judging a book by its cover, and that includes the audience.”
While Paranorman definitely delves into the spooky, it certainly doesn't deliver the kind of abject horror typical of many other films screened at Fantasia. While both Butler and Fell maintain that they were making a film with a youth audience in mind, they say that never stopped them from breaking away from convention. 
“All too often, movies for families can become slightly too sanitized,” says Butler. “I do think that children are complex and sophisticated creatures who quite often love to be scared. We haven't shied away from the scares, but neither have we set out to traumatize kids. I don't think we've made a horror movie for kids. We've made this roller coaster ride of an adventure movie that plays on horror references.”
Having both absorbed their fare share of macabre cinema during their own youth, it's no wonder that Norman is himself a horror (and specifically zombie) culture obsessive.
“Zombies are part of our cultural currency,” says Butler. “They're everywhere for everyone. Grandma now knows what a zombie is. There are zombie slippers, zombie games, zombie apps, kids' books, comics … it's everywhere. And that's kind of what gave us the license to play around with it. Zombie movies perennially rise again because they have something to say about current life. They always have some sort of social commentary and that's what we wanted to do here as well.”
While George A. Romero used the undead to comment on consumerism and the decay of society in general, the zombies of Paranorman help to further a message of acceptance and tolerance of those deemed 'outsiders' by mainstream society.
Ambitious in its scope by any standards, the story of Paranorman was made only more daunting to put on screen because of the medium chosen to tell it.
“The challenges are on all fronts, in all departments,” says Fell of working with stop-motion animation. “It's a big scale thing but on the other end we wanted a much more naturalistic, observational style for the animation and acting.”
“I definitely wanted it to be stop-motion because of the Zombies,” says Butler. “That seemed like the perfect marriage. I didn't want the limitations of stop-motion to affect how I wrote the story.”
While Paranorman will soon have its wide release, the filmmakers say they couldn't have been happier that it premiered at Fantasia. “It's an honour,” says Butler. “In terms of who is the perfect group of people to see this movie, you probably couldn't do better.”
Likening the expansion of Fantasia over the years to the incorporation of genre cinema into mainstream culture, Fell credits all of this to the coming of age of those kids who were once so enthralled themselves by the ghouls of the silver screen.
“The generation that grew up watching horror movies are now making them and having kids,” he says.