The Art and Making of ParaNorman

Jed Alger

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452119236
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño gráfico

From LAIKA, the studio behind the hit film Coraline, comes another marvel of stop-motion animation and creative storytelling. For ParaNorman, LAIKA's team of artists and animators built and brought to life a miniature town, a horde of zombies, and a quirky cast of characters to tell a tale of a boy with spooky talents who must save his hometown from a centuries-old curse. Featuring the amazing and detailed artwork that went into the film's creation—from character sketches and concept art to puppets, textiles, set dressing, and 3-D printed facial models— The Art and Making of ParaNorman goes behind the scenes to explore the exacting, exciting steps that are achieved frame by frame in this newest LAIKA masterpiece.

THE FIRST THING TO KNOW about making a stop-motion film is: collaboration. It’s just too big and too unwieldy to belong to one person. The writer helps the art director, who helps the character designer, who both influences and is influenced by the story department, and on and on. The directors talk to everyone, of course, and in the case of ParaNorman, this is a team of directors—Sam Fell and Chris Butler. The directors’ vision unites the film, but that vision is communicated to and interpreted by LAIKA’s 300-odd (and in some cases, very odd) artists, craftspeople, engineers, model makers, tailors, woodworkers, and problem solvers, each of whom puts a bit of him- or herself into the work.

It’s an amazing, complex, sometimes arcane process, seemingly far removed from the more showy technical wizardry of modern cinema. But if you automatically associate stop-motion film making with a quaint method of storytelling, you have not spent any time at LAIKA. “Stop-motion” says Travis Knight, CEO of LAIKA and one of its chief animators, “is a medium with its own language and its own particular set of storytelling tools with which we can tackle any genre—comedy, tragedy, horror, drama. The whole idea of LAIKA is to create a place where all these talented people can come together and make something that couldn’t be made any other way.” If that means combing through dumpsters looking for the right piece of scrap, so be it. Likewise if it means employing the cutting edge in computer 3D graphic effects, bring it on. There is a powerful love of stop-motion at LAIKA, but it stops short of reverence. These people are not building a shrine to stop-motion film making, they are bringing it into the future.

EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN IDEA AND, as it happens, this idea started with Chris Butler. He’d been thinking about a particular story for a few years, quite a few years actually, just kicking it around. It was all about childhood and the perils of growing up and what happens when you know a secret but no one quite believes you … oh, and zombies. When it became clear the idea wasn’t going to play nice and go away, Butler started writing it down. What resulted was the remarkable tale of Norman Babcock, a perfectly average kid who happens to be able to talk with ghosts, a talent for which he is bullied daily. But it is also the only thing that will save his town, the old New England burg of Blithe Hollow, from a 300-year-old curse.

Norman doesn’t do it alone, of course. Mr. Prenderghast, Norman’s estranged uncle and a fairly eccentric character around town, tries to warn Norman about the curse. Unfortunately, the fact that Mr. P. dies and has to deliver his warning from beyond the grave complicates things. So when Norman tries to spread the alarm, he faces a credibility gap. The first people to believe him are fellow misfits Salma and Neil. Next Neil’s brother, the strapping jock Mitch, gets roped in, largely because he has a vehicle, a panel van he dotes on. Courtney, Norman’s incredulous sister, gets on board strictly out of interest in Mitch. And even Alvin, the prototypical school bully, joins the team, as more and more supernatural force...