The spoiler note is preemptive.
Saw it a week ago, and while it doesn’t hit the perfectness Coraline had, it’s still a great effort.
One trailer showing the effort that’s gone into making the movie: - YouTube
Though the message is a bit hamhanded. Necessary, but hamhanded.What it is? “Please don’t go shooting up your school if you’re being bullied”. Yup.
Loved Coraline, thought ParaNorman was incredibly boring, unfunny, and nonsensical. Only got somewhat interesting in the last five or ten minutes, and even that was mostly just visually interesting.
We love Coraline…just got back from watching this, and thought it was visually remarkable but not as imaginative a story. I guess it helps when you start with a tale written by Neil Gaiman.
I loved ParaNorman; it’s probably my second-favorite movie of the year so far. What I preferred about this movie compared to Coraline were the characters. I liked Coraline a lot, but I didn’t really connect to it on an emotional level the way I did with ParaNorman. And I really loved that the filmmakers didn’t go overboard with the pop culture gags. The ringtone being the theme from Halloween and the hockey mask from Friday the 13th are really the only two obvious ones. If this has been made by DreamWorks, it would have been like a Halloween version of Shrek. shiver
It’s definitely my favorite animated movie of the year so far.
Just saw it. Loved it. Completely agree with Rollo Tomasi. The story Coraline was a better story but the movie execution didn’t hit me at any emotional level. This one did.
I’m with Rollo and DSeid. Best end credits of the year so far too, IMO.
Well, along with the end credits of Bernie and Moonrise Kingdom.
We saw it this weekend and liked it, but I was a bit disappointed. At the beginning Norman is, like the kid from The Sixth Sense, able to see and converse with dead people (they showed this in the ads, too), but after he gets the warning about the Witch from his uncle, this ability effectively vanishes, and seems to have been effectively forgotten.
Oh, his Grandma shows up at the end, and Norman is the only one (apparently) who can converse with The Judge, who seems to be a shambling zombie to everyone else, but neither of those was necessary. I thought maybe he’d use the ability to talk to the dead to find the Witch’s Burial Place, or learn from some courthouse ghost where the needed records were.
The whole last part seemed like a totally different movie. I realize that they were setting you up with The Ugly Wicked Witch thing, then dropping the cute little girl on you (I live near Salem, MA, and the film hits home to us – they “sell” the town with ugly and sexy witches and profit from them, but an awful lot of the witches and the “affliected” were actually young girls) But then the Cute Little Girl really DOES have awesome paranormal powers. They were woefully wrong to treat her as they did, but it sweems to escape everyone’s notice that they actually did have a reason to be scared of her.
Nevertyheless, I did like the film. we stayed through all the credits, because we know about aftercredits sequences.
Anyone else notice that the Speaker to the Dead who passed on had the same last name as the Witch?
Yes, and I thought it was a little strange that no one said anything. Were we supposed to assume that Norman himself (since the Speaker was his uncle) was related to the witch, and that whole “seeing ghosts” thing had been passed down through the generations?
If so, I guess it’s nice that the movie allowed us to draw that conclusion on our own. I was just waiting for the “a-ha!” moment that never really came.
I missed the last name, but assumed the connection anyway since Aggie and Norman look so much alike.