Last week I saw two stop-motion animated movies. One was in theaters and the other was new on DVD. ParaNorman, currently in theaters, was an enjoyable movie, but it wasn't totally what I expected, which isn't a bad thing. I chose to saw in 3D, and it doesn't need to be seen in 3D considering you can only notice the effect in the beginning titles and end titles. That bugged me, but really I should know better by now for every time there's a new movie released in 3D, I think that this time it'll look amazing and I'm let down. For me the most effective (besides theme park attractions) have been Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon.
Going into ParaNorman, all I knew of the film was based on the advertising which looked like good-natured fun, wonderful character design, and the studio producing it. For those of you that don't know, ParaNorman was produced by one of the few fully stop-motion animation studios, Laika. Laika is currently best known for producing Coraline in 2009, which was a creepy film with not very likable characters, but still felt like a fun film. Before Laika was Laika, they were Will Vinton studios, best known for the California Raisins advertisements. When Will Vinton was fired from his own studio, the majority shareholder of the company handed the reigns to his son, who was an animator at the studio, Travis Knight (Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike is his dad). In my last post, I had stated that there are few movie studios making original family films. Pixar has been quite successful at making original stories, but are now making more and more sequels off of their original stories. Dreamworks has been making original stories and sequels interspersed with ones based off of books (Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon), but soon that may change. First Dreamworks is making a feature film based off of Sherman and Peabody, characters that were featured in Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle series. Recently Dreamworks acquired Casper the Friendly Ghost, He-Man, Baby Huey, Felix the Cat and a slew of other animated characters.
It's easy for movie studios today to take a known property, like an old TV series, a remake or reboot, and/or sequels to old movies, and make a movie to sell to a new audience. Laika is based off stories that are maybe not that well-known, like Coraline, or creating movies that are original, like ParaNorman.
Like I said earlier, I was expecting a light-hearted film, much in the way The Goonies and Monster Squad felt like to me when I was a kid. ParaNorman starts off with a goofy take on a zombie film, it's quite funny and you think this is the film you're in for. Quickly we are introduced to Norman, who is watching the zombie movie on TV while his Grandma sits behind him. We quickly learn that Grandma is a ghost and Norman has the gift of speaking to the undead. His parents find him weird. His sister finds him weird. The entire town finds him weird. He's an outcast and because of that, Norman is bullied. Suddenly the movie doesn't feel so light-hearted. Norman's mom tells him that people bully out of fear, because they fear what they don't know. It's an interesting moral, one that I don't think has been featured in a film before and one that is definitely important today. ParaNorman has moments of fun sprinkled throughout, but it also appears very violent for a family film. This is the second animated film in two years that I can think of, where a pistol has been pointed directly at a child's face. The first was Rango and this one it's a police officer pointing it at Norman. This bothers me that the filmmakers think it's ok to have a gun pointed at a child. I wish they would rethink how to make this effective. I'm not saying remove guns entirely, I just think there's a better way to stage it.
I liked ParaNorman, but I didn't love it. As you can tell, I'm mostly talking about Norman, bullying, violence and that's what I took away from the film. It's a movie featuring zombies and ghosts, yet I didn't feel that connected to those aspects of the movie, which is funny considering the movie is called ParaNorman. I wanted to see that fun monster movie for kids, but that isn't exactly what this film is.
The other stop-motion movie I saw was The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Produced by Aardman Animation and released by Sony Pictures, The Pirates is based off of the book "The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists". Aardman has produced short films, commercials, tv series, and feature films for decades, but they're probably best known for Wallace and Gromit. Aardman has a long history with US animation studios, which I was about to write about here, but I may save that for another post.
The story of The Pirates! centers on a not so impressive group of pirates who love ham. The pirates all want to be taken seriously in their "profession", especially the Pirate Captain, voiced by Hugh Grant. That is his name, the Pirate Captain. In fact all of the pirates on the ship, don't seem to have any names, so we don't really get to know them. The movie starts off interesting enough. the Pirate Captain wants to be taken seriously, and to do so, he wants to win the Pirate of the Year award. When he goes to apply for the award, he quickly sees that he's a laughing stock by other pirates. He's about to give up, when his crew, seeing that the Pirate Captain is down, convince him into plundering and pillaging to win the award. There's a quick montage of them failing miserably and then they find themselves on Charles Darwin's ship. This is where the film takes a left turn. The Pirate Captain has a "parrot" that is in fact the last living Dodo and Charles Darwin convinces the Pirate Captain to use the Dodo to win the Scientist award for discovering the bird.
Suddenly the film is less about pirating and more about if the Pirate Captain should give up his beloved bird. It may be because I was watching it at home, but I started to lose interest in the story. Like many of Dreamworks animated movies, this film has a lot of pop culture references. Many aren't funny, and instead you're rolling your eyes while watching them. Also, I think because many of the main characters don't have interesting names (or no names at all), you really don't connect with them. They just become, pirate.
The movie was ok, but I think I was hoping for something more.
What I did notice in this film and in ParaNorman as well, is the attention to detail. One of the best things about stop-motion animated films is that almost everything on screen is tangible. Everything is hand made, sculpted, sewn, puppetted. In the early Aardman Animated films, you could see fingerprints on the characters left by the animators pressing the characters into place (In Flushed Away, Aardman even put fingerprints on the CGI characters). In the climatic kitchen scene in The Pirates, the ovens, vents, tiles, windows, even the tiny spatulas and kitchenware all had to be created by hand. It's quite impressive. In ParaNorman, the wood houses, the cars, the trees... it feels like you're watching your childhood toys come to life in a cinematic way. This year alone, there'll be three full-length stop-motion animated features being released by major studios. Next up will be Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, and based on the trailers, it looks like it will be a lot of fun.... but then again, don't always trust the advertising.
