As a creative entity, is there ever anything harder than the “sophomore slump”?

When you’re working as a creative force, your first project will always be judged on its own. You have as long as you like to debut it, and when it arrives, it’s as pure as you will be creatively. Once you plan that second project, however, you not only have your own creative wills to combat against, but the difficulty of expectation.

For the filmmakers at the stop-motion team of Laika, they made an astonishing debut in 2009 with the brilliantly sublime Coraline, and today they release their latest film, ParaNorman.

If you’ve missed the trailers, allow me to give you a brief rundown of the movie. Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) might just be like you. Norman is a misunderstood, middle school aged boy who doesn’t have many friends and LOVES scary movies. However, Norman has a skill you probably didn’t as a pre-teen - he can speak to the dead. All sorts of ghosts making their way around his town of Blithe Hollow both see and speak to Norman, but no one else sees them, causing him to be labeled a weirdo and a freak. His parents, voiced wonderfully by Jeff Garlin and Leslie Mann, don’t understand him, and deal with a mixture of frustration and sympathy respectively. Then, one day, as the anniversary of the witch hanging that Blithe Hollow celebrates every year approaches, Norman is pulled into a madcap adventure filled with zombies as he is made apparent that he is the only person who can stop the centuries old witch’s curse.

What makes the film really great is that it works on two levels - similar to some of the best Pixar work, for the kids, it’s just the story of a weird boy who sees ghosts and then gets thrown into the adventure of his lifetime. For the adults, it’s a story of the difficulties of adolescence, struggling to be accepted, and the hardships of defining one’s self, especially when no one understands you. What makes it a very off-beat family film however, is unlike most, which builds themselves on a core of heart, ParaNorman is instead build on a core of a forelorn sadness.

Looking back now, the middle school years were the hardest, an awkward transition of self-definition and understanding, and the movie perfectly portrays it. What was truly gutsy, however, is how dark the movie is willing to be. Sure, there are strong moments of slapstick humor, and some strong wit from the script, but the ending is actually really sad and goes places I didn’t expect. The witch turns out to be nothing like you would expect, and if you’re seeing ParaNorman as a family, it might lead to some difficult conversations with the kids.

Laika perfectly pulled together a team of great voice actors - many you remember from great movies such as Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, John Goodman and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, but you never have what I call the “Dreamworks Factor”, where the voice talent is so star-studded that it’s almost distracting. The character designs for the movie, while not all together memorable, remains strong, and the creature design is a particular highlight (I have a fondness for one zombie who’s lower lip is no longer attached, causing it and his chin to just flap about). This is Laika’s first experiment with facial designs from a 3D-printer, as opposed to hand sculpted, and the experiment works out great. Skintones in particular have a more realistic translucence to them - I was mystified by the ears on these things!

When looking back on the movie, the part that’s hardest is that immediate comparison to Coraline. ParaNorman is a good movie, perhaps not great, and its narrative risks alone make it a worthwhile journey to the cinema - but it sadly never establishes that eye-opening wonder which Coraline delivered in spades. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to directly compare the two, but as such a fan of Coraline, I couldn’t help but do so. At the end of the day, ParaNorman reminds me most of Sony’s 2006 CG film Monster House. Both movies are going to be great to watch around Halloween, both have some surprising narrative twists, but neither fired on all cylinders. That said, its still one of the most original movies of the Summer, and worth a see. Just be sure to know that if you’re taking the kids, they might have some weird questions at the end.