Jed Alger - The Art and Making of ParaNorman

Ean McNamara digital

I AM A CAVEMAN. A thickheaded, knuckle-dragging troglodyte who refuses to evolve with the times.

There, I said it. After all, I live in an era of glossy, high-tech digital perfection, and I work with a pair of decidedly low-tech hands. You see, Im a stop-motion animator, practitioner of that most anachronistic of art forms that cherishes craft over technology. And while technology is a triumph of organized, disciplined intellect, stop-motion is an exercise in messy, physical exertion. Its hard to imagine two perspectives more at odds with each other. But one of the things that make LAIKA unique is how we fuse the sensibilities of Luddites and technophiles, merging the handmade warmth and charm of stop-motion with the precision and flexibility of cutting-edge technology to create something entirely new.

It was the approach we took on our film Coraline, and an approach we continue to pursue, to push the medium to its breaking point and beyond in order to tell bold, distinctive, and enduring stories. After Coraline, the question was, what would be the groundbreaking idea to take LAIKA and the medium to the next evolutionary stage? The answer came in the form of a quiet, charming, and perplexingly humble story artist named Chris Butler.

Nearing the end of production on Coraline, Chris, our head of story, approached us with an idea that had been roiling around in his head for a while. It was the story of an exceedingly strange boy, who ultimately uses his remarkable gifts to save the very people who marginalized him. It was a moving and human story, one of intense beauty and emotional truth. And zombies. Groaning, slobbering, foot-dragging zombies. For me, a guy who grew up subsisting on a pop-culture diet of Ray Harryhausens spasmodic stop-motion marvels and George Romeros shambling, brain-eating ghouls, it was a dream project.

It should be noted, by the way, that Chris Butler is an artistic dynamo. An exceptional draftsman, world-class storyteller, and a virtuoso with language, his work is sheer poetry. Chris is so damned talented its almost unseemly. He, together with his similarly and enviably skilled directing partner, Sam Fell, led and inspired a motley collection of consummate artists and technicians, steely-eyed pragmatists and starry-eyed dreamers, devoted entirely to pouring their souls into this wonderful story.

In an odd way, the story of ParaNorman is largely the story of the people who made it. Because look, lets face it, artists in general, and animators in particular, are strange people. In high school, we were the kids who got shoved into our gym lockers. Who holed up in our parents basements, rocking out to Rush albums and rolling polyhedral dice in the latest Gary Gygax D&D module. And as grownups, well, we play with dolls for a living. Clearly not a lot of growth there.

Whats more, the life of a stop-motion animator is hardly the most socially enriching existence. We spend most of our days with minimal human contact, stuffed away in a dark cave surrounded by giant Duvetyne curtains, sweating under hot set lights, and inhaling noxious fumes from rubber cement and hot glue. Its perhaps no wonder that were essentially a band of oddball, navel-gazing mole people with limited social graces.

But theres also something quite wonderful and liberating about living on the fringes of society. Like our hero Norman, we are given a peculiar perspective on the world. You think beyond your own experiences. You become in tune with things that others may have forgotten. Childlike things. And, if youre lucky, youre possessed of the uncanny ability to peer through the scrim of everyday existence to find beauty and magic in the ordinary. As it happens, these are defining qualities of the prodigiously gifted crew of ParaNorman.

These pages are a celebration of the misfits, the outcasts, the beautiful freaks who see the world in a different way and, in the process, enrich the lives of those around them. Were all the better for it. Hopefully, like me, youll be moved and inspired by their stories, their imagination, their brilliant artistry. And youll be reminded of that time-honored truism: You dont become extraordinary by being normal.

Heres to being weird.

Cheers,

TRAVIS KNIGHT

President and CEO, LAIKA

T HIS BOOK IS ESSENTIALLY THE EQUIVALENT OF me cornering you at a party and forcing you to look at baby pictures. You wont get any apologies, however, because Im a ridiculously proud parent. ParaNorman is my baby and it has been kicking and screaming and soiling its diapers in my head for many years. Now that it is taking its first tentative steps into the wider world, I can use this opportunity to coo affectionately about its conception.

A family legend, expounded by my dear departed Nanna, suggested that I was born with a pencil in my hand. As gynecologically unpleasant as this sounds for my mother, and as much as it might explain why she had no more children after me, it is as succinct and perfect a summation as I can think of for my innate ability to draw stuff. I apparently had a gift.

Like so many children with an artistic predilection, I was also something of an outcast. I didnt fit in. I discovered that standing out from the crowd was only an option if the crowd got to call me names and throw things at me. When grown-ups used to tell me, My school years were the best years of my life! I used to think, Wow, your lives must really suck.

And so I kept myself to myself. I read a lot. I drew even more. I dined out on a diet of monster movies and animated TV shows and comic books that presented me with all manner of colorful abstractions of the decidedly less rewarding real world.

This is where ParaNorman came from. Its the story of a lonely, bullied, gifted kid existing in a world thats something like what might happen if John Carpenter and John Hughes made an episode of Scooby Doo together.

It is a movie that celebrates the different, not just narratively, but artistically, as does the studio that produced it. LAIKA is a bubbling crucible of every kind of abnormally talented dork, nerd, freak, and geek you could ever have the good fortune to meet. One of them is my boss, and a source of endless inspiration, the phenomenally talented Travis Knight. He not only liked my script, but stood behind it and championed it as an ambitious and irreverent vision never diminished by compromise. For that Ill be forever grateful.

This book aims to illustrate the artistry in our medium, but also in our process: in our day-to-day rituals, banter, notes, and doodles. Its not only a testament to Sam Fell and Arianne Sutner and all the heads of departments mentioned in these pages, but to all the guys who stand behind them. There are hundreds of them, each equally deserving of praise and recognition for what theyve brought to this project. This is the most exceptional crew Ive ever worked with. Its been a privilege to trust them with my babys upbringing.