In the town of Blithe Hollow, New England, eleven-year-old Norman Babcock is a boy who can speak to the dead, and sees ghosts wherever he goes, but no one besides his eccentric new friend, Neil, believes his ability is real, others believing he is either mad or some sort of freak or outsider. One day, Norman’s estranged eccentric uncle tells him of an important annual ritual he must perform in order to protect the town from an ancient curse cast by a witch it condemned centuries ago. Initially skeptical, and not wanting to seem any more eccentric, Norman decides to cooperate, but things don’t go according to plan, causing a magic storm of sorcery which makes the accursed dead rise from their graves and threaten the town of Blithe Hollow as Norman, his sister Courtney, Neil, Neil’s brother Mitch and bully Alvin, not the sharpest shovel in the graveyard, try to reverse the curse, but are chased by the hoards of the undead. As the zombies cause havoc all over the town, Norman discovers the terrible truth about the curse, that the witch was not an evil sorceress, but an innocent girl, Aggie, who was blessed with special, benign psychic powers, but was killed because the ignorant villagers misunderstood and feared her. Norman knows that break the curse and return Aggie to rest he will have to meet her vengeful spirit face-to-face, and that will take every last ounce of his courage.... A punning title which produced the expected ParaNorman Activity headlines in the press, ParaNorman is intriguing not only because of it’s surprisingly dark storyline with Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee - The Road) being a misunderstood young boy who can speak with the dead, having to take on ghosts, zombies and disbelieving grown-ups when he discovers his town is at the centre of a centuries-old curse which threatens to destroy it and everyone in it, but also that the pic is a stop-motion 3D feature co-produced by Laika, responsible for 2009‘s superb Coraline, which itself was pretty chilling in parts, so much so that quite a few reviewers mentioned it probably wasn’t suitable for very young kids, comments which were also levelled at ParaNorman, even if this is played far more for laughs than the Neil Gaiman adaptation. The co-directors are Chris Butler, who also provided the screenplay, and was the storyboarder on Coraline, and Sam Fell, who also helmed Aardman’s Flushed Away and who largely took over the much-troubled The Tale Of Despereaux, and shows, although in a different, entertainingly gaudy green style, the artistry of the work put into any stop-motion feature, which although still augmented by CGI for backgrounds and other embellishments, is still a hugely painstaking and time-consuming process, although this is the first stop-motion feature to use character’s faces created by 3D printing for all the different expressions rather than employing traditional Plasticine or similar, but this doesn’t detract from the terrific design and styling, and although the story deals with the walking dead, trust us that this is more in the style of kid’s cartoons rather than a Fulci or Romero pic, and although the film is rated PG it shouldn’t cause any sprog aged around six or up any sleepless nights. The script is pretty traditional in having a cursed town, the curse having been laid by an aggrieved victim, wrongly put to death, and our hero is the only one who can stop it, the subtle message being that some people are different and misunderstood being cleverly and relatively subtly slipped in, as is seen in the smart ending, reversing the expected horror cliches, when the young heroes find themselves being chased by the traditional torch-weilding mob. The voice cast shows the sort of talent this sort of project now attracts, actors once upon a time rejecting voiced animated features as being beneath them, the line up including Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air / The Twilight Saga), Leslie Mann (Mrs. Judd Apatow no less). John Goodman (The Artist), Casey Affleck (The Killer Inside Me), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Kick-Ass), Jodelle Ferland (Silent Hill / The Cabin In The Woods), and, seeming a little out of place in this line-up, Bernard Hill (TV’s The Boys From The Blackstuff). Visually extraordinarily rich, if not quite as neuanced as Coraline, Laika are very much developing their own, distinctive style, both in design, execution and storytelling, which makes them one of the most genuinely interesting independent productions companies currently around.