I was all prepared to be unhappy about this story but then got a pleasant surprise, or at least, a potentially pleasant one:

Focus Features and LAIKA, the companies that gave us the standout animated feature CORALINE, take another venture into genre territory with the 3D stop-motion movie PARANORMAN. The long-gestating zombie project now has a release date, and story/cast details have been released.

Sam Fell, director of FLUSHED AWAY and THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX, and Chris Butler, who did storyboard work on CORALINE and CORPSE BRIDE, are helming PARANORMAN from Butler’s original screenplay. The synopsis is as follows: “In this comedy/thriller, a small town comes under siege by zombies. Who can it call? Only misunderstood local boy Norman, who is able to speak with the dead. In addition to the zombies, he’ll have to take on ghosts, witches and, worst of all, moronic grown-ups, to save his town from a centuries-old curse. But this young ghoul whisperer may find his paranormal activities pushed to their otherworldly limits.”

LET ME IN’s Kodi Smit-McPhee (pictured above) speaks for Norman, and the voice cast also includes Casey Affleck, Tempestt Bledsoe, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Bernard Hill, Anna Kendrick , Leslie Mann, FRIGHT NIGHT’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Elaine Stritch. Others on the behind-the-scenes team are producers Arianne Sutner and LAIKA president/CEO Travis Knight, visual FX supervisor Brian Van’t Hul (an Oscar-winner for KING KONG and another CORALINE vet), production designer Nelson Lowry and director of photography Tristan Oliver. PARANORMAN has been penciled in for release August 17, 2012.

The press releasey article is light on details, but we like the idea of solving a conflict between the Living and the Differently Animated with DIALOGUE.

After all, that’s what we do.

ParaNorman* might be just up our alley, and hopefully, yours too.

*I have no idea what the proper capitalization yet. Just a guess.

Tags: Movies, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.