PARANORMAN: I Wish I Understood You

ParaNorman (2012) – Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler – Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin, Elaine Stritch, Bernard Hill, Jodelle Micah Ferland, John Goodman, and Tempestt Bledsoe.

PARANORMAN is a ridiculously dumb title, but that’s the only thing this movie does poorly.

PARANORMAN is a very good stop-motion movie about two kids, separated by three centuries, who are demonized and ostracized by their community because they can talk to the dead. I love it when kids’ movies are smart, and PARANORMAN is a cleverly constructed tale that starts rather predictable but gains momentum as it barrels towards its highly effective conclusion.

At the center of PARANORMAN sits Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a kid who’s being ostracized by his town for being weird. Norman can see and talk to the dead, but the town doesn’t believe him, and thus mocks him for what they perceive as his strangeness. If it were just the kids in town, PARANORMAN would be following in the steps of numerous kids’ stories where our protagonist lives just outside of the normal path, but there’s a particular viciousness laid into Norman by his father (Jeff Garlin) that really sets this movie apart. Perry is all over Norman for being weird, and he delivers the most stinging attacks on Norman’s character. Kids are resilient, but when the harshest and most consistent abuse comes not from the school bully but your own father, it’s not hard to see why Norman spends much of the movie’s opening sequences with his head down. It’s a common theme in stories like this for the parent to not understand their child, but Perry is much closer to someone like Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon than simply a parent who thinks he knows what’s best for his kid.

At school, Norman gets FREAK painted onto his locker, and is the main target of the school’s bully, Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). When we’re introduced to Alivn, I was not feeling PARANORMAN. It’s early in the film and while I like the twist of Norman’s opening scene revealing that his grandmother is actually dead despite her sitting and watching TV with him, Alvin is rendered as a cartoonish bully. The physical appearances of these characters was a bit of a concern – we have the fat dad, who’s a bully at home, and the fat older kid, who’s a bully at school. I get nervous when films fall into the “good guys are attractive, bad guys are ugly” bit, and luckily, PARANORMAN doesn’t fall into that trap. Part of the film’s charm is that it renders its characters as exaggerated physical types, but then lets the characters overcome that type. Alvin, for instance, goes from bullying Norman to partnering with him when the dead start coming back to life.

The return of dead corpses back into the realm of the living is surprisingly gruesome and, for a kids’ movie, surprisingly scary. Clearly, the filmmakers of PARANORMAN like scary movies, and not just because they dot the film with allusions to John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. I really think the filmmakers have set out to actually scare kids; PARANORMAN doesn’t just wink at horror movies – it is a horror movie. Scenes where the dead claw their way out of their graves, where the zombies attack Norman and his associates, and where reality is consumed inside powerful visions of the town’s past are actually pretty intense and much more forceful than I was expecting in a kids’ film.

I absolutely love how PARANORMAN uses history to set the foundation for the present. Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts is clearly an analog for Salem, the home of the most infamous American witchcraft trials, but the look of the town owes a great deal to Stephen King’s Maine or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. In the pure tradition of King and Hawthorne, Blithe Hollow is a town that looks quaint but hides a terrible secret. There are images of witches all over Blithe Hollow, but the images are largely of the wicked witch variety – big noses, green skin, cackling smiles. The town’s identity is built around the town elders catching and killing this witch 300 years previous, but when Norman gets to the truth of the matter through his visions, he learns that the “wicked witch” of yore is actually a scared girl roughly the same age as him.

It’s admirable that PARANORMAN has this reveal, because the way these “non-normative” stories usually go is that our protagonist is picked on, but over the course of the film overcomes the abuse to prove everyone wrong. Certainly, PARANORMAN offers this narrative through Norman’s arc, but with the little girl witch, Aggie (Jodelle Micah Ferland), the filmmakers show the dark side of that story arc, of what can happen if the protagonist can’t overcome the abuse – she gets unfairly singled out and murdered.

It’s interesting and telling about what the filmmakers want you to take from this story that Norman spends more time during this movie adventuring with Alvin than Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), the only kid at school that wants to befriend Norman. Neil gets picked on, too, by Alvin and his buddies, but he has a rosier outlook than Norman does about life. Norman, in fact, rejects Neil’s friendship advances several times before finally welcoming him in. The rest of the adventure crew contains Norman’s sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) and Neil’s brother Mitch (Casey Affleck). Both Courtney and Mitch are physically attractive people, and Courtney spends much of her time flirting with a non-responsive Mitch. The jock is a bit low on the IQ scale, so the film could be suggesting that Mitch simply doesn’t realize what Courtney is doing, but then at the end of the movie, he tells her that he has a boyfriend. Non-normative characters are often coded in such a way to allow non-normative kids to identify with them, but this is the first time I can remember a kid in an animated movie being explicitly gay.

What really puts PARANORMAN over the top is the final showdown between Norman and Aggie. Norman doesn’t defeat her through a physical battle but by telling her the story of herself and allowing her to let go of her hate and anger and rediscover happiness. The animation through this sequence is top notch and the interplay between the two kids who can talk to the dead is outstanding. Norman clearly sees himself in Aggie, and when he learns the truth about her through a vision, he becomes her champion as much as her opponent.

PARANORMAN only did so-so at the box office ($60 million budget, $99 worldwide haul) and it’s easy to point the finger at bad marketing when a good film under-performs. This is a tricky movie to sell, though, because the things that make it great aren’t things you can put in an advertisement. PARANORMAN isn’t at its best in singular moments that can be cut out of the film and assembled together to make an effective 30-second TV spot; it’s at its best when it gets beyond the obvious and starts to open up its world and its characters to reveal that people (even dead people) are far more than their appearance.

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My latest book, STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE: THE CHRISTMAS OPERATION is now available for purchase in PAPERBACK and KINDLE formats.

SAFH is a kid’s espionage novella, but it’s also a tribute to the television shows I watched as a kid: The A-Team, Magnum PI, Knight Rider, Hardcastle and McCormack, Riptide, Dukes of Hazzard and generally any show where Post and Carpenter did the music. Recommended age? If you let your kid watch superhero cartoons or Knight Rider reruns, SAFH should be age appropriate.

Here’s the back cover description:

Jurgen the Gorilla. Throne the Lion. Bronze the Golden Eagle. Ray the Brown Bear. Bottle the Dolphin. Dev the Lynxwoman. 3 the Triceratops. Ptera the Pterodactyl. These eight stuffed animals make up the Return Squadron. For seven months they have worked together to return disconnected stuffed animals home. But now … on their final mission, the Return Squadron seek to steal the legendary Map of Everything. Before Christmas morning arrives, three of the Squadron will turn traitor, four will be stranded, and one will never see another Christmas.

WALL-E: This is What Happens When You Put the Doctor in K-9′s Body

WALL-E (2008) – The 9th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by Andrew Stanton – Starring Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, and MacInTalk.

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There are political, economic, and environmental issues writ on a massive scale in WALL-E, which is why the film’s unifying, universal image of better days coming from the simple act of holding hands is so powerful.

WALL-E is one of the finest movies ever made, a true triumph of emotional storytelling and the power of animation. It is a film rife with social commentary, presenting a world gone so off the rails that there are no humans left on Earth.

Early in the 22nd century, humans conditions have become so bad on Earth that humans have piled into a massive starship called the Axiom and left for deep space. They leave robotic cleaning units behind called WALL-Es (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) to pick up all the trash. The movie opens 700 years after the humans left, and we find that there’s only one WALL-E unit still in operation.

WALL-E (Ben Burtt) is a wonderful character, combining the programmed basics of robotics (he still dutifully reports for work every morning and returns home every evening), and a developed sentience (he has a fondness for collecting pieces of junk). This junk collecting robot strikes me a bit like a kid version of the Doctor; like our time machine stealing Time Lord, WALL-E is curious, a bit child-like despite his advanced age, lonely, awkward around women, and incredibly determined when he sets his mind on something and dedicated to those he cares about.

For all of the gorgeous scenery on display in WALL-E (and this is Pixar’s most visually magnificent movie), it’s this beautiful being, this young mind in an old robot’s body that carries this film. Yes, there are plenty of “big” messages here about how unchecked industrialization is killing the Earth, how the deepening integration of corporations and government is most definitely a Bad Thin, and how our increasing reliance on technology is making us dependent on technology. All of these messages are relevant and powerfully rendered without resorting to preachiness, but they wouldn’t mean a darn without the story of WALL-E falling in love with EVE (Elissa Knight).

WALL-E is content at the start of the movie to keep doing his job. There’s a lot of trash lying about on Earth and he goes around collecting it, pulling it into his body, ejecting it in a compact cube, and then stacking the cubes in arrangements that eventually look like skyscrapers. Devastating as these images of Earth are, it’s the occasional glimpses of broken down WALL-E units that really strike home. As our WALL-E does his job, he (and the robot is definitely gendered male) takes note of various interesting pieces of junk and sticks them in a cooler he carries with him. While he works, WALL-E also listens to music, which plays an important role in his development. When he returns home each night, he plays old musicals and watches them with a sense of awe. When a particular piece of music strikes him (and this clearly seems to be determined by the scene in the movie more than the song), he records it so he can play it at work the next day.

The routine of WALL-E’s daily schedule is broken with the arrival of a spaceship that delivers EVE to Earth. There’s a humorous non-chemistry to them at first. EVE is powerful, bright, white, shiny, and rounded – nearly opposite WALL-E’s boxiness in every way. Personality-wise, EVE is all business, while WALL-E is a lovestruck suitor, following her around. When WALL-E eventually gets her back to his place, she notices the small, single-stalked plant that he found in a refrigerator, and her programming directive kicks in. She stores the plant inside of her and shuts down, waiting to be retrieved.

WALL-E doesn’t know this, of course, and he cares for her, trying to make her better by putting her in the sun, incorrectly assuming that because he uses the solar energy to recharge, she’ll need to do that, too. EVE is completely unaware of WALL-E’s concern because she’s in hibernation mode, but later she’ll see footage of his actions and be incredibly touched by them.

When WALL-E eventually decides to go back to work, EVE’s spaceship comes back to take her home and WALL-E freaks out. Rushing home, he tells the cockroach he hangs with to stay put, and then clings to the side of the spaceship as it blasts off. WALL-E clings to the side of that ship all the way across the vastness of space until they reach the Axiom, the corporate-built and controlled space liner that contains what remains of the human race.

Like EVE is to WALL-E, the Axiom is a bright, shiny binary to the desolate Earth. Humans have become so fat and lazy over the years through their reliance on technology, that the human race has become these large masses of doughy flesh. They wheel around the ship on floating lounge chairs and their heads are eternally buried in the computer screen right in front of their face. On the bridge, there’s a struggle for power between the human Captain (Jeff Garlin) and Auto (voiced by the old MacInTalk program). All of this is background for WALL-E’s dedication to getting EVE back, and there’s plenty of enjoyable escapades on board the ship (the ship’s computer is voiced by Sigourney Weaver), including a truly magnificent flying/dancing sequence with WALL-E and EVE outside the ship.

At the core of the disagreement between Captain McCrea and Auto is the plant that EVE has collected. According to protocols, evidence of plant life is supposed to automatically send the Axiom back to Earth. The cruise had been designed to be temporary, but things were so bad that 700 years have passed. What Auto knows that McCrea doesn’t is a second message send by BnL CEO Shelby Forthright (Fred Willard in a live-action role) ordering the ship to never return.

McCrea’s actions against Auto are the first real decisions of his life, and he, WALL-E, and EVE eventually get the Axiom back to Earth, where the human race begins to reclaim the Earth.

More important for the movie, however, is that EVE desperately repairs WALL-E with items from his home base. At first, the repairs make WALL-E work, but don’t contain any glimmer of his personality, but EVE holds his hands and leans her head close to his, and they share a kiss (personified by an electric spark that connects them) which brings WALL-E’s personality back to the surface. It’s a truly beautiful, truly emotional moment.

WALL-E might very well go down as the best movie Pixar ever makes; the company has a ridiculously successful track record, of course, but WALL-E, for me, operates on a higher level than any other film in the catalog. It’s not just that this is a very good main story (and Pixar has told better stories), but that it’s the combination of good story with phenomenal, unique characters, a multi-layered plot, and truly amazing, gorgeous animation. WALL-E feels important, too, in ways that most other films (animated or not) do not; from the first moment to the last (including the really good closing credits which continue the story), WALL-E feels like a completely special and unique film.

CARS 2: I Really Am Just a Tow Truck

Cars 2 (2011) – The 12th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by John Lassater – Starring Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Jason Isaacs, Thomas Kretschmann, Eddie Izzard, John Turturro, Joe Mantegna, Tony Shaloub, Bruce Campbell, Franco Nero, John Ratzenberger, Vanessa Redgrave, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech Marin, Katherine Helmond, Jeff Garlin, Edie McClurg, and Richard Kind.

They made an entire movie about the freaking sidekick.

Not a direct-to-DVD movie. Not a made-for-cable movie. Not an animated short that gets played before the real movie, but an actual, honest-to-goodness $200 million release about the …

about the …

… about THE FREAKING TOW TRUCK.

Maybe John Lasseter’s office at the Magic Kingdom is actually in the parking garage, because sucking on exhaust fumes is one of the only possible explanations I can come up with for making this movie revolve around the one-note (one-not-really-that-funny-note) Tow Mater.

I had heard a lot of negative reaction to CARS 2, and through the first 30 or 40 minutes of the movie, I was wondering what could possibly have caused such a negative reaction. The film opens with a fantastic action sequence on an oil rig that sees Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) doing his whole super cool British spy thing. There’s plenty of action and the top flight CGI animation that Pixar does better than anyone else.

From there we head to Radiator Springs, where Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is returning home after winning his fourth Piston Cup championship. He reunites with best pal Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), his girlfriend Sally (Bonnie Hunt), and is about to enjoy some good ol’ fashioned time off when Mater gets him wrapped up in some international racing competition. Milex Axelrod (Eddie Izzard) has created this new alternative biofuel called Allinol and to prove how awesome it is, he’s going to stage the World Grand Prix, which will have race cars from all over the world, and from all different series. He’s on TV being interviewed alongside Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro), a Formula One-styled racing car, who loves himself even more than the ladies love him. Francesco does a bit of trash talking and next thing you know, Mater is calling in to the talk show to talk up the awesomeness of Lightning. When McQueen realizes what’s happening, he jumps on the phone and accepts the invitation to the race.

We’re off to Japan for some really gorgeous CGI and engaging hobnobbing and racing and espionage as Finn and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) show up to meet with an American contact. The contact is supposed to be Torque (Bruce Campbell), but the bad guys are onto him. Mater gets in the middle of their battle because Mater is hilarious and Mater in a Japanese bathroom stall is hilarious times hilarious, and Torque attaches his information device onto Mater without the tow truck realizing what’s happened.

And from there the movie rather begins to sink, as it becomes apparent that this is a Mater movie, with McQueen relegated to doing some racing stuff in between Mater being hilarious with Finn and Holly.

I lay the blame for the disappointing CARS 2 solely on the decision to focus on Mater. The story is fine, in and of itself, though the larger themes of friendship and how it’s okay to be a stupid American while in other countries falls a bit flat. The idea of a World Grand Prix is a good one, and the espionage plot is well-conceived, too. Finn and Holly travel by plane and train as they seek to solve the mission of who’s behind the Big Evil Plot, but that idiot Mater is sitting right in the middle of all their espionage stuff being Mater. I just don’t understand what Lasseter was thinking. It’s a classic sequel mistake of taking what was funny in small doses in the original movie and then loading up on it because, obviously, if a little of something is funny than a lot of something is going to be super funny.

Except it’s not.

I suppose it might be possible to say that one’s enjoyment of CARS 2 is equatable with one’s enjoyment of Larry the Cable Guy. Well, my enjoyment of his shtick is rather low, and so every time he does his “dum dum dum der der dum dum der” routine, I want to hit the fast forward button. In small doses, it’s fine, but in large doses it’s just … so … tedious.

It’s a shame because I love the idea of CARS 2. I love the racing angle. I like the idea of taking McQueen and Mater out of Radiator Springs, but Mater’s whole “Dumb American Abroad” routine is as tiresome to me as it is embarrassing to Lightning. I don’t even mind seeing the secondary characters I liked so much in the original CARS become almost non-existent because we get a bunch of new, equally cool secondary characters.

But to build this idea around Mater … Ugh.

CARS 2 certainly isn’t an awful movie. If nothing else, Pixar has created a gorgeous movie to look at. Rather, CARS 2 a pretty good movie with a really awful center. I suppose it’s a bit like enjoying a Tootsie Pop but hating the Tootsie center – it starts all awesome and then bogs down in chewy junk.