He sees dead people; pretty cool, huh, kids?

Enlarge Image

MICHELLE SIU / THE CANADIAN PRESS (CP)

Enlarge Image

Top, Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) is spooked by Mr. Penderghast (voiced by John Goodman) in ParaNorman. Above, Fell (left) and Butler.

It is a matter of Hollywood biology that movie genres will occasionally cross-pollinate to form new genres: The science-fiction noir, the zombie romantic comedy, the crime melodrama.

But surely one of the most dangerous cross-genres is the horror movie designated for kids. Such a blend requires that the scary stuff not be too scary and the kid stuff not too puerile.

Such was the challenge for Chris Butler and Sam Fell, the co-directors of ParaNorman, a stop-motion kids comedy about a little boy who sees dead people. Butler, who also scripted, says they had to maintain an all-inclusive vision throughout the shoot, remembering that in the two to three years it took to shoot ParaNorman, it may take an entire day to come away with only a few seconds of film.

"We were definitely aware we were making a film for kids and adults, and we just had to be conscious of it every day of the process," Butler says in a phone interview. "How far is too far?

"But we didn't want to shy away from it, either. We wanted to make a brave movie... my original intention with the script was to write something that was irreverent and challenging and took us to places that we don't normally go to in animated productions."

Indeed, the setting for the movie is a Massachusetts town where a past involving Salem-like witch trials is manifest by cute, Disneyfied tourist attractions. The young hero, capable of communicating with spirits, learns of a supernatural menace connected to one such trial that may have dire consequences for his fellow citizens.

It is a daringly provocative theme for a kids movie, but co-director Sam Fell looks at the movie as a kind of teachable moment for kids.

"It turns out that all the fictional monsters aren't the scariest thing and in the end, it's what's in the human heart that's really the scary stuff," says Fell, a U.K. native who wrote and directed the Aardman Animation feature Flushed Away. "We get to understand the event that was, in the end, driven by fear and ignorance. So we're not just presenting it as background, we're exploring it."

Will the film's horror elements be too much for some kids? Likely so, admits Fell.

"It's such a grey area," he says. "You can't scientifically nail an age group. Every parent knows their kid and we've met parents who have taken five-year-olds to screenings and they had a fine time. And there are other parents who have said I wouldn't take my eight-year-old to this."

If it proves to be a hit with kids and adults, some of the reason may be the film's disarming sense of humour. As with the equally dark stop-motion feature film Coraline -- likewise produced by the Oregon-based Laika Studio -- there is a decidedly English sensibility in the film doubtless traceable to Fell and Butler, Englishmen both.

"I grew up in England on a steady diet of American culture, though," says Butler. "I think that's the thing here.

"It's very much an American movie and it takes place in Massachusetts, it involves a mythology that's based on American history, and it includes contemporary American archetypes. But yes, maybe being an outsider, it entitles us to comment from a step back. We can observe the world we live in from a slightly more irreverent angle."

As for the horror movie designation, that may be a little harsh, Butler says.

"Yes, we reference horror elements, and we have some fun with that genre, but actually what we set out to do was like a roller-coaster ride that includes scares, but is as much about the humour and the heart as well."

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie Preview

ParaNorman

Opens Friday

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne

PG

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 16, 2012 D5