It’s the second feature-length film from Portland’s LAIKA Studios following Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline a few years back, which was nominated for every major film award in the animation category, and it once again shows the clever and amazing things that can be done using stop-motion animation. While it does involve zombies and witches and other scary things, it’s still very much a family-friendly film (i.e. no stop-motion innards splaying at the screen in 3D or anything like that).
You may remember the earlier report on our set visit to LAIKA’s Portland studios a few months back or read our review. Clearly, we’ve already spent a lot of time talking to co-directors Chris Butler, who also came up with the idea and wrote the script, and Sam Fell, whose previous movies Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux did not show any signs of being made by a horror fan, but we figured it was worth one more interview now that we’ve seen the movie.
ParaNorman takes place in a small suburban town called Blythe Hollow where young Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road) sees and speaks with the ghosts of the dead. When he’s visited by his eccentric uncle Prenderghast (John Goodman), Norman is sent on a quest to put a stop to the town’s 300-year witch’s curse which leads to the walking dead arriving in town, along with his friend Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), his older sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) and Neil’s brother Mitch (Casey Affleck).
ShockTillYouDrop.com: When I spoke to you guys in Portland, it was before we had the tour of LAIKA and saw that huge process of making the movie, and after doing that, I immediately had more questions for you guys, particularly how you could oversee that whole machine.
Chris Butler (on the left below): I think at some point, it’s like a boulder running down a hill and you just have to know where you’re aiming that boulder to start off with because it just takes off. Sam Fell: It is like that. The first half is pushing that thing up the hill and for us, that’s all the work. Getting it up there and then you’re right, it tips and then your job is chasing it down the hill trying to control it.
Shock: Even keeping track of where everything and everyone is. I have to imagine that new people would immediately get lost there.
Fell: Oh, yeah, yeah, but we were guided around
Butler: We have wranglers.
Fell: They have walkie-talkies.
Butler: Seriously, it became difficult at times to even go to the bathroom.
Fell: Well, they’d let you in there but they’d wait outside, wouldn’t they?
Shock: Let’s start with you, Chris, because you’ve been working on this for so many years, so now that it’s done, what was the biggest surprise in the whole process of getting this made and finishing it.
Shock: Okay, because you made a Scooby-Doo reference and then you had a guy who sounded almost identical to Shaggy. If that was the same guy, I’d say that was taking the in-jokes too far.
Butler: No, no, no.
Fell: Yeah, that would be a funny Easter egg.
Shock: Jon Brion was also a really interesting choice to do the music so what kind of direction did you give him on this? Did you just tell him what movies you were interested in?
Fell: You know you use temp music when you’re piecing the rough version of the film together, so we used a lot of his music in the first act and that sort of vibe of “Eternal Sunshine” and those movies really fit in Norman’s world.
Butler: Way back, really way back at the beginning, when I knew this was going to be a reality, I storyboarded the first few pages of script and I slapped them together in iMovie with some temp dialogue and I put “Eternal Sunshine” over the top of it and it was such a good fit that it just seemed to stick.
Fell: It was the flavor of the world, but then the middle bit was the stuff he hadn’t really done before, which was the action chase music and stuff, but he’s so smart that guy. He can do anything.
Shock: I definitely felt like it started very much like what we’d heard from him before but then it changed to more horror-type music.
Butler: Yeah, but then the movie changes.
Shock: Any idea what you guys want to do next? Do you think you’ll continue working together?
Fell: I dunno, take a break.
Butler: But not a break together.
Fell: (laughs)
Butler: We can find a beach somewhere
ParaNorman opens nationwide on Friday, August 17th. Look for our video interviews with the cast soon.
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