Paranorman

Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler (in his directorial debut), ParaNorman is a genre-bending delight: a horror-comedy for children that respects its audience enough to be genuinely terrifying, and a monster movie that argues the monsters are not the ones shambling through the graveyard, but the ones pointing fingers from the safety of the town square.

The most immediate visual marvel is Norman himself. He holds the distinction of being the first 3D-printed lead character in cinematic history. LAIKA’s rapid-prototyping department printed over 8,000 unique replacement faces for Norman alone. This allowed for a granularity of emotion previously impossible in stop-motion. Watch Norman’s eyebrows twitch, his lip curl in suppressed grief, or his eyes widen in slow dawning horror—that is not puppetry by wire, but the result of animators swapping out a micro-fraction of a millimeter’s difference in a resin eyebrow every single frame. ParaNorman

The final shot of Norman, sitting on the couch, watching zombie movies with his grandmother’s ghost, encapsulates the film’s thesis: You don’t have to fix the world. You don’t have to change who you are to fit in. You just have to find the few souls—living or dead—who see you for who you truly are. Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler (in

The film’s political and social allegory is not subtext; it is text. Blithe Hollow is a town obsessed with the performance of history (the parades, the plays, the merchandise) while utterly ignoring the lesson of history. They worship the myth of the witch hunt while remaining incapable of recognizing a modern one. Norman is the town’s scapegoat for being different. Alvin bullies him for being weak. The principal blames him for disrupting the status quo. The final shot of Norman, sitting on the